Life Begins At…

Earlier this week, I used a bag of pumpkin that I’d baked, pureed, and then frozen in our deep freeze to make a loaf of orange-pumpkin bread. It’s not a yeast bread, which makes it a “quick bread.” I needed to use up the pumpkin, because I’d mistakenly thawed it instead of the creamed corn that I had assumed it was. And once it was thawed, I couldn’t re-freeze it.

I baked this bread in a stoneware pan I had ordered back in the fall of 2000, when I was 26. A friend from my church at that time hosted a Pampered Chef party and invited me, along with lots of other women from our church. I rarely bought non-necessities for myself, and I love to bake (then and now), so I purchased the loaf pan that night.

Near the end of the evening, when the presentation had finished and I had begun writing a check for my order, I listened to the conversation flowing around me. One of the women mentioned working out at the on-campus gym at the university in our town–where I mentored college students in my role with Cru. I also worked out at this state-of-the-art gym and loved the classes there. So I was paying attention to the chatter even as I wrote out my check.

But then the woman describing her experience at the gym made a comment about the thin young college women who typically populated that workout facility. This woman, a mother of several children, then remarked loudly, “Those girls have never used their uteruses.” {I think the plural of that is actually ‘uteri,’ but anyway…} 

Our corner of the room grew very quiet and still. I looked up from my checkbook to see some rather awkward expressions. I was fairly confident I was the only woman in the room who was neither married nor had had children. I suppose that made me one of those girls who’d never used her uterus. And most, if not all, the others in that room knew that about me. It made for an odd moment for all of us, even though I knew the comment had nothing to do with me personally.

In New Zealand, pre-children.

At the time of the Pampered Chef party, I was a single woman in my mid-twenties living in a small town. I often felt hard pressed to find “my place” at church, in community. There was no “singles group” or Sunday school class for young adults who were neither college students nor part of a couple. And if there had been, I’d probably have been the only person attending. So I sidled out of the college student class I attended and began teaching Sunday school to 4- and 5-year-olds at our church. This turned out to be a fantastic experience.

But it would be another 6 years before I would use my uterus, if that means having a baby. During that same season of life, when I lived and worked with college students in that small Mississippi town, a freshman who’d recently experienced a bad break-up with her boyfriend came over to my apartment for dinner. Before she left that night, she asked me, “Are you OK with being alone?” I thought she was referring to my not having a roommate. So I answered that I had wanted to have my own apartment for a while and appreciated living by myself. She explained that she actually meant “alone,” as in “not married and not attached.” I was genuinely surprised she had asked.

Growing up, I believed, at some point, I would get married and have children. And I wanted that–although my life has certainly not turned out as I had expected or hoped or asked God to bring about in some ways. And I got both:  marriage and children. But that doesn’t happen for everybody, and that does not mean that you’re “less than” if you haven’t used your uterus. 

I was living a full life before I had a husband or sons, and some of my richest, most life-shaping adventures took place before I even met Mike. Life didn’t begin when I became part of a couple or when I became a mother. Nor did it end when I left the single life behind (or the childless life behind, although Mike I never find ourselves at Barnes and Noble at closing time on the weekends anymore).

My worth isn’t wrapped up in whether I’d be chosen as a wife or whether I could birth and nurture a new little life. My value is not determined by what I can do or accomplish, but by Whose I am. One of the verses from Scripture that speaks to me so strongly currently is Ephesians 2:10:  “For you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, to do good works, which God prepared in advance for you to do.” I’m God’s workmanship–a poem He is writing–not because I can muster up some good works but simply because I’m His. Because He has awakened me to faith in His Son and made me His child. Now, I have the privilege of doing good works because I get to partner with my Father in His redemptive plans for this world.

And that truth has never been dependent on whether I’ve used my uterus.