Nine Months Earlier

Nine months earlier. That’s when it really began. In a way, that was the greatest miracle of them all. The birth of Jesus was the end of something that He shared with all of humanity – the nine months that started with conception. For those nine months He was being ‘knit together in His mother’s womb’ (Psalm 139:13). We imagine the little new-born baby in the manger. But nine months earlier He was microscopically small – literally!

What a baby experiences in this nine months can have a deep and lasting impact. Babies aren’t immune to what is going on around them and the feelings of the mothers that carry them.

I sometimes wonder how Mary’s reaction to knowing the enormous responsibility that she now had might have been felt by Jesus: stress? anxiety? She was human, after all, and what mother-to-be doesn’t have her worries? Surely there was local gossip about the betrothed girl who was pregnant and still unmarried. We know that Joseph was considering breaking the engagement. How would Mary have felt about that? And what about that journey to Bethlehem right at the end of the pregnancy and all the stress of finding nowhere to stay? And then the trauma of being born.

For some of us, those nine months may have been free of anything like that, although I doubt whether there’s ever been a pregnancy without any stress. A war-time baby, my father away with the Royal Marines in Burma through most of the pregnancy, I have needed healing for the impact all that had on my life. I can’t, of course, remember it, but that doesn’t lessen the impact and the lasting effects.

Nine months before His birth, Jesus had already come to earth. Had His Father lost sight of Him? Not at all! He was ‘knitting Him together’. He has been watching over every one of us since the moment of conception. He knows everything that we experienced in those nine months. And, if we still carry wounds inflicted then, these too were carried at the cross by Jesus, by whose wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).