For days now my body has been tightening and releasing, tightening and releasing again. Contractions come, pass, and return. Time has lost its usual edges. I am waiting, but not passively. My body is doing something I cannot hurry or manage.
Between contractions, my mind keeps returning to words in Romans chapter eight. Not because I am trying to interpret this moment, but because Scripture sometimes gives language to things we would otherwise endure in silence. Paul speaks of creation groaning as in the pains of childbirth. Not poetic groaning. Physical groaning. Unchosen, involuntary, exhausting.
I am exhausted.
As my body labours, I know the world labours too.
Between contractions I find myself reaching for my phone. The news is everywhere – every alert, every headline cutting through the quiet of the room.
Reports of strikes.
Escalation.
Iran and various countries exchanging threats again.
And then the headline that makes my chest tighten: the Supreme Leader of Iran has been killed.
Not because I mourn the man himself. His rule carried decades of repression and suffering for many. But the news made something else clear: the situation had crossed into something darker, more unpredictable. The ground had shifted again.
From far away I watch the country of my childhood tremble.
The streets where I grew up, the people I love, the land that formed me, suddenly they are folded into the language of geopolitics and military strategy. Power tightens. Fear circulates. Uncertainty settles over a country already carrying decades of unresolved grief.
There is no neat separation between what’s happening in my body and what’s happening out in the world. Both bear weight. Both ache. Both move toward something not yet seen.
What strikes me about Paul’s words is not that they explain suffering, but that they refuse to sanitise it. Paul does not rush us to hope. He stays with the groaning. Creation groans because it is unfinished. We groan because we are unfinished too.
Psalm 131, my favourite psalm, has been close to me in these hours.
“My heart is not proud, O Lord,
my eyes are not haughty.”
There is nothing impressive about labour. It humbles the body. It strips away illusions of control. It feels undignified. I do not concern myself now with great matters or things too wonderful for me. I cannot solve geopolitics between contractions. I cannot carry the future.
I can only breathe.
One, two, three, four.
In. Out.
I am exhausted.
The psalm speaks of a weaned child, quieted, resting against its mother. Not asleep. Not unaware. Simply held. That image feels truer than any attempt at bravery. I am not strong in this moment. I am being carried. I am learning, slowly and unwillingly, what it means to be content without resolution.
Romans eight tells us that the Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words. I do not have eloquent prayers right now. I have breath. I have pain. I have waiting. And somehow Scripture insists that this too is prayer.
I do not yet hold my child.
I do not yet see justice or peace or healing.
I do not yet see how the world’s labour resolves.
But I am here, between here and there.
Quieted not because everything is finished, but because I am learning, slowly, to rest in God like that weaned child in Psalm 131, held without answers.
Creation groans.
So do I.
And neither of us is forgotten.
