Marvel of Marvels

Most of you will know that me and my wife, Maggie, are expecting our first child. Her due date is April 19th. We are very excited, but thankful for nine months time to prepare our home and marriage.

While we are acquiring baby essentials and learning about what it means to parent, our child isn't twiddling his or her little thumbs. Wondrous and marvelous changes are happening to ready this child for life outside the womb. We're following these events in a book, From Conception to Birth: a Life Unfolds by Alexander Tsiaras and Barry Werth. Tsiaras uses the latest in microphotography to capture prenatal development and Werth describes what he beholds.

Here's where Maggie and child are right now:

Despite its wondrous growth and development, its physical achievement, the fetus so far has shown little or no discernible independent movement. It has differentiated into parts - organs, muscles, systems - each with a capacity to perform a specific function. The marvel now is how those parts begin to reunify; how they mold themselves into a form that anticipates, to the last detail, the day the newborn will leave the protective comfort of its mother and begin to fend for itself.

Gradually, at about 8 weeks, the fetus begins to stir, as if from a paralyzing sleep. "Now when the brain signals," embryologist Robert Rugh and obstetrician Landrum Shettles note, "the muscles respond and the fetus begins to kick, turn its feet, and curl its toes." Though it measures little more than an inch long, its arms bend at the elbows and its fingers gather in a fist. Its eyes are sealed shut, months away from first sight. Yet as Rugh and Shettles, pioneering observers, noted, when researchers began in the 1970s to snap more and more portraits inside the womb, it frowns, squints, furrows its brow, purses its lips, and opens its mouth.

These activities lack "purpose" - there is no specific correlation between stimulus and response. But as the fetus stirs, it jars our understanding: In order for even the healthiest to become an individual, able to survive outside its mother, there reamins an astonishing amount of growth, preparation, and refinement still to master.

And so while the 2-month-old fetus may be more or less whole, it will require another 7 months inside its mother before it can fully face the world -- 7 months in which its weight will multiply up to 1,000 times. It is as if all the instruments of an orchestra have been created. Now, in the third month, rehearsals begin for a lifelong symphony, and hte players must learn to perform. In unison.

Is there anything so marvelous as this? King David didn't know the half of it when he wrote in Psalm 139, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." What comfort Maggie and I take from this reality! And not just while our child is in utero, but for his/her entire life. David knows that God's knitting doesn't stop with the birth -- v. 16, "Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

God has great plans. He is working them out right now in glorious detail. Let us respond as David did: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."