PUSH: Pray Until Something Happens

By: Brooke Keith

“PUSH!”

Long before I knew that nurses will quite literately SCREAM at you to up your adrenaline to push when it is medically necessary to speed up delivery, I was a 15-year-old girl with braces on my teeth thinking to myself how “mean” this nurse in the purple lipstick was as she held up my bony leg.

I can still see her in my mind.

My mouth was cut up from the specialized hee hee who who’s of it all.

Gums on metal.

And my little hips? Not developed all the way. Makes me a little sad to think that I didn’t know how much of a kid I still was. I thought that because a second time senior had laid eyes on me, I must be special. I must be “mature for my age.”

Looking back now?

It really was going to be my baby and me against the world.

“PUSH! NOW BEAR DOWN, I MEAN IT!”

I suddenly wanted my mother, but I looked up to meet her gaze only once. She was crying. The look on her face said what my spirit knows today… I was a baby.

“PUSH!!!”

I’d never been so banged up. My epidural was turned off so I could “feel” my baby come out. It felt like one of those camps where people send you to “learn.” But it never “teaches” you anything but how to be afraid of people and their intentions. Those camps.

Soon? The nurse in the purple lipstick was just another woman walking out of my room for shift change. And my baby? He was quite possibly perfect. I was not. But him?

A different story.

No Christmas present in Appalachia could compare. Not even that one time I got something that was on my list. Honestly? It was always the things under the tree I didn’t ask for that ended up being my favorite. Mama was really good at that.

I always wanted an American Girl doll.

I got one.

A baby made by an American girl.

“PUSH!”

25 years later, I see that nurse in a new light. Was she mean? Maybe. Did she get me mad enough to push? Yes. And in that way? She did her job. I also never forgot the pain of birthing a child when I myself barely weight 100 pounds. I’m grateful I got to feel it even if she intended for it to “teach me a lesson.”

It didn’t teach me what she thought.

It taught me beauty absolutely comes from it.

It’s 2:11 A.M. and I’m still thinking about what my son is doing across town in his house. He’s here because I pushed.

Hannah.

I don’t know that nurse’s name. But the older I get I always call her “Hannah” in the story. Hannah was the woman that was so distraught that she had yet to bear children that she bypasses the high priest like a crazy woman. You did not break rank or tradition in the old temple. But Hannah? Hannah had business with God.

They assumed she was drunk. It wouldn’t have been uncommon to teach her a lesson. Maybe not brutish but a lesson, nonetheless. The high priest knew better. Hannah goes into that temple and lays it all down. Weeping. Wailing. Maybe even throwing herself into the floor or whirling like a mad woman.

We will never know how Hannah appeared. We just know it was so severe that even the clergy people thought she was drunk. (And we are supposed to assume the best!)

Hannah, having no baby in her woman, PUSHED. She prayed until something happened.

The Bible says she left the temple happier than she’d ever felt allowed to be. Finally! The depression, the begging, the pleading…

It ended there.

And something new began when she pushed.

Years later, Hannah would PUSH in the same kind of pain I was in when I birthed my oldest son. I know she never forgot how it felt. She may have even had a “mean” nurse. But it wouldn’t matter. Much like mine did not. All that mattered was that I was holding in my arms the most precious gift I’d ever been given moments after the worst physical pain of my life.

The oil of gladness for our suffering.

Today, maybe you have grown weary. Maybe even angry at the spiritual “midwives” in your life. Some of them? May not even have your best interests at heart. Never you mind. Like my Granny in a little dirt floor farmhouse, you will PUSH. Nine babies. More grandchildren and great grandchildren than she could count.

What a blessing!

And all the prayer that wore that floor thing when it finally got wood planks!

She PUSHED.

And every time she did? Even if it took years. Something happened.

I can only imagine the prayers my Granny prayed over me. I was an odd bird. I was a wounded bird. And then? A little bird raising little birds. I know she had to have seen herself in me. Somewhere.

When it hurts. When you feel alone. When you want to give up. When you think it will never happen for you. When you are angry. Afraid. Weeping and seemingly drunk with sadness. When you feel every voice yelling in your ear. Just PUSH like Hannah.

Pushing through the crowded atmospheres of lies…

And right into the Throne Room of Grace where prayers are answered daily.