Belmont University Advent GuideSample

About two years ago, when a couple in our neighborhood found out they were pregnant, they entered a time of feverish activity in home improvement. Trips to the hardware store ensued, to paint shops, comparing and contrasting colors, paintbrushes, and ladders, all for the transformation they wanted to bring about in the home office that was suddenly becoming the baby’s bedroom. Gone was the desk to make room for the crib.

Another couple we are friends with went even further in their initial preparations: not only would the walls get a new coat of paint and some home office furniture be displaced, for their new arrival the whole room was transformed into a magical place, the baby’s name stenciled on the wall, complete with pictures of animals dancing around the room.

In addition to being on a first name basis with the clerks at Sherwin Williams and Home Depot, the expectant couples we know quickly become acquainted with the Craigslist ads for baby furniture; they make phone calls to other friends for hand-me-downs. And if our friends have parents who come into town, they wait until those visits for the inevitable retail shopping trips for baby clothes and all of the equipment that is apparently needed to raise a child in America today—young husband and wife hopeful that the baby’s new grandparents will pick up the tab on high-priced items, those designer booties—and if lucky, even the tab for that obscenely priced stroller that has a better suspension on it than most cars.

As I think about our friends who have had babies already, and as my wife and I enter that time in our lives when we’re thinking of expanding our family with a new life or four, I wonder sometimes how much all this activity is for the baby and how much of it is for the parents. The preparation of these spaces, it seems, is really part of the preparation of the heart for new parents, a way of marking and preparing for this transition, a way of reshaping external and internal spaces to make room for new life.

Lord, make of our hearts a fitting home for what is being born in our lives. Amen.

Donovan McAbee
Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts