December has always been a busy month in my family for birthdays. My uncle’s birthday was 19th December; my mother’s 23rd December and my father’s 24th December. When my son and daughter-in-law announced their pregnancy with a due date in December, I felt as though this was quite fitting as a family tradition!
The due date was 21st December and my daughter-in-law, with the confidence of youth, was sure the baby would come before Christmas and she would be home to celebrate Christmas as usual. I was less confident, knowing that due dates are not definite predictors (I’d listened to the ‘More or Less’ programme about this, which confirmed that only 4% of births are actually on the due date, you see!) Sure enough, as time went on, it became clear that the baby would not be here on 21st December and Stacey was booked in on 23rd December in the afternoon to be induced.
So now we were left with a whole host of ‘significant’ family dates on which my granddaughter could be born, with many friends hoping for a Christmas Day birth! As it turned out, Esther waited until the evening that Christmas Eve to arrive, quite the longest 24-hour period I’ve known in a long while! We celebrated my Dad’s birthday in the usual way, but no one’s mind was really on his birthday that year as we waited for news of the newest Turner arrival.
Eccl 3:1 reminds us that there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun. Gal 4:4-5 tells us ‘But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.’ There are times and seasons for birth and for death; Ps 31:15 confidently asserts ‘my times are in Your hands’. We may not know what lies ahead this Christmas and throughout 2018, but we can rest in the fact that God does know and will be with us throughout. All life cycles are in His hands.
