Think God makes mistakes? 

I initially posted this to Facebook during Holy Week, 2019.  It seemed appropriate to share for my birthday as I meditated on His love for me and revisited Psalm 139.     

As I’ve taken time since Lent to quietly question and ponder God’s love for me, I’ve found wave after wave of His truth washing onto the shore of my soul. He knew me and loved me since before I was born.  I was conceived 13 years after my parents’ “first family”.  Although I was never told I was unplanned, I must have been a bit inconvenient to an established family of five.  Whether or not my mother and father planned me is irrelevant.  God planned me.  He planned me before I took my first breath.  He was the first One who truly knew me, who knit me together with excruciating detail as I grew in my mother’s womb. 

At week three my parents’ chromosomes came together to determine the color of my hair and my eyes, and even my adventurous and outgoing personality, very different from my mother’s. 

My heart started beating at week six.  God made my heart specific to His plan for me.  It beat strong but was created almost unbearably sensitive, because He knew I would grow up to empathize deeply with hurting people. 

At week ten, my facial features were being formed and I had a well-developed profile and eyes, mouth, and ears.  He gave me a McElhattan nose and cheekbones and a Greer mouth. He gave me ears that would hear the sound of the ocean, voices of the people I love, beautiful music, and the birds outside my window at dawn.  He knew I would sometimes look in the mirror at that face and judge it harshly, but He made everything perfect.  At week ten, He also started making the connections inside my brain that would help me to be really good at music and not so good at chemistry. 

At 13 weeks, since I was developing into a little girl, my ovaries were already filled with hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Ironically, God already knew that I wouldn’t be able to conceive my own children.  He was the first one to know and wasn’t surprised by my infertility.  He doesn’t make mistakes. 

At 18 weeks, I could hear the sound of my mother’s voice and listened to the music that she was listening to, preparing me to love big bands from the 1940s. 

God was the only One with me for 40 weeks in that womb, and He lovingly prepared me for the life He had planned for me.  It wasn’t a surprise to Him that my Mom would miss my brother John’s high school graduation to bring me into the world and nothing has surprised Him since.  He loved me before I was even born. 

As if all that wasn’t enough, He knew that my soul longed for the closeness with Him that I had in the womb.  Knowing that I could never do enough to reach Him, He reached down for me.  He sent His Son Jesus to be born into this world, to live a sinless life, and to die so that I could live with Him forever.  This unfathomable love ruins my sensitive beating heart in such an amazing way.  I will spend the rest of my life living to thank Him.   

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