Life Principles in the News
The following appeared in the The Catholic Northwest Progress on January 24, 2010
Love Frequently Requires Abandoning Our Plans
By Camille Pauley
It's 5:53 in the morning on January 12, 2010, and I am in early labor as I write this article. At 41 years old, and after 17 years of pro-life activism, I am about to have our firstborn child. God is such a mystery.
Pregnancy is weird. My hands are completely numb, my ankles disappeared weeks ago, and I've sprouted an array of freckles on my face and fine hairs on my stomach. Who thought this up?
Pregnancy is also a bit scary. The moment people suspect you are nearing your due date, they reassure you with personal horror stories. "I was in labor for three days!" "We got stuck in traffic and had little Jamie on the 520 bridge in front of 50 gawking onlookers!" "My wife yelled obscenities I didn't even think she knew!" And here's my all time favorite: "Whatever you're thinking labor pain is going to be like... forget it. It's a billion times worse."
Pregnancy, for me, was also quite unexpected. I was 38 when I married the man of my dreams, and we both suspected that I was past my childbearing years; so I wasn't even thinking about having babies. I was running a pro-life organization, traveling around the world, and living a life of missionary zeal. But life as we know it is never quite good enough for God. He was determined to visit me with something profoundly more beautiful, despite myself. And so, little Juliette was conceived.
Now, nine months later and ready to pop, I'm struck by how deliriously happy I am about the whole thing. Is that okay? Shouldn't I be worried about overpopulation, or genetic disabilities, or my career? The prevailing cultural attitude is that a responsible person would have thought this thing through and considered abortion, or at least contraception. In this world where everything has to be planned in order to be legitimate, my attitude has struck some people as reckless.
When I mentioned this to my husband, he smiled and said, "Plans are overrated." He's right. We're so concerned about planning our own happiness, that we risk missing the pearls in the oysters. And when our plans don't bring the happiness we expected, we can become not only deeply unhappy, but even depressed.
We expect, for example, that material things will bring us happiness, and so we plan our lives to amass the greatest personal gain at the smallest personal cost. But in the end, material things can never make us truly happy. They just make us want more things.
We expect that success, recognition, popularity, and power will lead to happiness, and so we sacrifice whatever seems to be in the way of personal achievement. Sometimes we sacrifice friendships, sometimes marriage, sometimes our own children. But in the end, our goals for self-advancement don't bring the happiness we were expecting. They bring a lot of stress, fear, aggression, ego-sensitivity, self-absorption, envy, and even bitterness and cynicism.
When we finally realize that the very things we sacrificed in order to achieve material gain or ego-benefit were the things we needed to be truly happy, we can be thrown into crisis. But we have also taken the first step toward redemption.
Here we learn, like the Prodigal Son, that the only thing a Christian should expect will bring happiness is love - a love that frequently requires abandoning our own plans. Anything else simply isn't good enough.
If human beings are made in the image of God, and God is Love with a capital "L", then we are little loves. Juliette is love. Her very essence is love. She is made out of love, and made by love, and made for Love. Why in the world wouldn't I be deliriously happy at her pending arrival? - especially in light of the fact that she wasn't my plan - she was my gift. Love is about to explode from my womb, so to speak, and I wasn't even planning it.
So, I don't wish wealth or prosperity or great achievements on my daughter. My wish is that all of her plans will be foiled by the God of Love whose plans for her are greater than anything I can ever teach her to expect.
Camille Pauley is the co-founder and President of the nonprofit pro-life organization, Healing the Culture. For more information or to contact Camille, please visit www.healingtheculture.com.