Little she-who-is turns 7 today. All week long we were preparing her for fewer gifts on her actual birthday because of the disruptions from the storm. She doesn’t care. It’s her birthday and that’s reason enough for celebration. Love that kid.

Been working with some friends on a study guide for Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World and ran across this quote:

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are. When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, “Here, I guess, since this is where I am.”

The great Billy Jonas has a song, “Anyway you go you’re gonna get there.” It’s a nice statement of faith, or at least confidence, that things have a way of working themselves out. I don’t think the statement encompasses all of human experience, but most everyday stuff fits well enough.

On this, C’s seventh birthday, I’ve been thinking about 3:30 a.m. as the point at which “anyway I go I’m gonna get there.” I’ve given birth three times, with three very different labors. C came after a long exhausting labor, with about 25 minutes of pushing. M came very quickly; after almost two weeks of prodromal labor, I went from a sound sleep at home to a birthed baby in the hospital in 2 1/2 hours. J’s labor was somewhere in the middle, with most of the labor happening in the evening. But wherever and whenever they started, every one of my children was born around 3:30 in the morning.

I believe that people have a Place in which they are spiritually at home. Why not an Hour too?

And what is it about 3:30 for me? It’s the middle of the night, when everything seems scarier, worries are amplified, and there’s no one around to talk to about them. Labor requires you to confront all those demons. Heck, parenthood does that too—the whole “heart walking around outside your body” thing.

It’s also a quiet time; it’s a deep time, with its own gifts, if you can discern them peeking out at you in the dark. That’s parenthood too—we’ve had a pretty significant life disruption these last two weeks (though minor in the big scheme, of course). And boy, have nerves been frayed. But there have been so many gifts too that I’m not looking forward to normal life starting again. Maybe that’s the point of 3:30 a.m.—life at 3:30 is normal life.

Photo: Little she at two days old. I wonder what her Place and Hour will be?