It was Easter morning at 2:00am when Brook, Margie, and I woke up with Pastor Dulek yelling outside our living quarters “Brook! Brook! New Baby!”. I was a bit confused. He told us that Pastor Ham’s wife is giving birth and that we should go see what is happening. We didn’t even know that she was pregnant because her sarong had concealed her stomach so well.
We went in Pastor Ham’s hut and saw his wife lying on the ground with a tiny baby girl on the floor right next to her. She was still in the “giving-birth-let‘s-push-out-the-baby” position. The midwife was massaging the mother’s stomach. (I was pretty shocked. It was my first time seeing a woman give birth in a hut in the jungle.) After taking care of the mom, the midwife cut the umbilical chord of the baby girl and wrapped her along with the placenta in a cloth.
Later that morning, the Ham family asked my team to name their newborn baby girl. We decided to appropriately name her Grace, which Webster defines as “favor, pardon”, because it was on Easter that Jesus’ resurrection galvanized both the favor of God and the pardoning of the wrongs committed by humanity. New life was given to the Ham family on Easter and new life is available through Christ.
Erwin says it better than I can in An Unstoppable Force: “Paul says it like this in 2 Corinthians 5:17: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!’ The Greek word used for ‘new creation’ means metamorphosis. Many of us know metamorphosis through the image of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly for a tadpole becoming a bullfrog. It describes a radical and irreversible change in the very essence of the object of that metamorphosis.” (p. 80) As a followers of Christ, we need to ask ourselves, are we assuming that new life that we’ve been given? Remember, it’s already been given.
