Your Body is Now Public Property

I always believed it, but now I know it to be true. For some reason, when you're growing a human being in your tummy, it suddenly ends all concept of personal space and you WILL be touched. Not just by your close friends and family, but by strangers. Strangers! Two people could be completely indifferent to each other, but as soon as someone hears those two little words (I'm pregnant), the whole facade falls like a fortress wall crumbling to pieces.

"Oooo! You're pregnant!" Out shoots the hand straight for the belly (which, in my case, is still pretty small. Not that it matters to the stranger touching me.). "When are you due?"

I really can't complain that much, though, because I see the sincerity and wonder in their eyes, the confusion over the mystery and the excitement at the prospect of life. Being pregnant really is a wonderful and bizarre concept, and you don't need to be pregnant (obviously, for the male sex) to get that "weird wonderfulness" on some level.

The miracle of pregnancy truly is a miracle, and I shouldn't be surprised that others think so. But why are so many people drawn to pregnant women? Why does it open so many doors and cause so many walls to crumble? We can read about, research and study the chemistry and science behind it, but that never seems to fully explain just how it is that one can grow another.

Jeremiah 1:5 says, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you."

And Psalms 139:13-16 says, "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me when as yet there were none of them."

Somehow even those who don't believe that they were formed by a creative and loving God, that they were formed by the One who formed the universe, that they were FEARFULLY and WONDERFULLY made are drawn to the miracle of pregnancy. It's as if, when we reach out to touch a pregnant belly, we're somehow drawing closer to the miracle through osmosis, losing ourselves in the mystery and the magnificence of new life. 

And to think, each one of us was once that miracle, too.

What an amazing thing.