Marked by Light

For I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”

(Gal. 6:17)

Christopher’s Birth

I had never felt such peace at a birth as I rocked in our burgundy recliner beside the window. The stormy night sky was softening now, fading into lavender and pink as the sun kissed the edges of the clouds. I couldn’t tell whether the rain was moving in or out. I tapped my toe against the wood floor to keep the rocker moving, listening to the quiet creak of the chair and the distant drip from the eaves.

This was my fifth birth, and it hadn’t gone anything like I’d planned.

Five days earlier, we’d been gathered in the Durkins’ living room for dinner with a guest of Kevin’s, a young, energetic producer who wanted to do a documentary about our life. He had bright eyes and a load of enthusiasm, the kind that made everything feel like a potential scene. We were polite but reserved, unsure what we thought about being filmed at all.

Then he glanced at my nine-month-pregnant belly and smiled.

“It would be wonderful,” he said. “I could even attend your birth. What a story that would be.”

That was definitely not going to happen.

What I didn’t say—what I barely acknowledged to myself, was that I was already having regular contractions. Earlier that morning I’d noticed small, familiar signs that labor might be beginning. But as the evening wore on, unfortunately, something else took hold of me. A fever rose suddenly. I began to shake with chills, my body aching, my head pounding as if it were being squeezed from the inside. A flu had been going around our church community.

I leaned over to Dan and whispered, “I think we’d better head home. I’m not feeling well.”

“Labor?” he whispered back.

“Not sure,” I said.

But when we got in the car, the truth came spilling out of me in tears.

“I am in labor, and now I’m coming down with this flu that’s been going around.”

Dan prayed for me right there, his hand resting on my shoulder. I climbed into bed when we got home, my teeth chattering uncontrollably.

For four days, the fever raged.

I could barely swallow. Even sipping a drink took effort. My throat burned, and a deep, hacking cough settled in my chest. I lay there day after day, acutely aware that I was nine months pregnant and utterly incapable of bringing a child into the world in that state. The contractions disappeared as suddenly as they’d come, as if my body had simply decided, Not yet. Not like this.

As a midwife, I understood the physiology. As a mother, I felt the helplessness.

Then, last night, at 9:45, the fever broke.

I woke drenched in sweat, but clear-headed, almost light. I climbed out of bed and ran a bath, sinking into the hot water with a kind of relief that felt spiritual as much as physical. And there, in the stillness of the tub, the contractions returned, deep and vice-like.

I welcomed them. I wanted this finished. I wanted this child born. I wanted my body to remember what it knew how to do.

I said nothing at first. After all, the contractions had stopped once already. I put the four children to bed with a story, lingering a little longer than usual, and then climbed into bed beside my husband.

All night I woke intermittently as the contractions came—steady, every eight minutes, never wavering, slowly growing longer and stronger. It was strange. Most of my previous labors had begun five minutes apart and tightened quickly from there. This one felt patient, deliberate and almost restrained.

At two in the morning, the contractions changed character. I slipped silently out of bed and into the recliner, rocking through each one in the dim light from the glowing nightlight.

By 5:30, Dan rolled over and opened his eyes. He saw me rocking.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in labor.”

We listened to the intermittent rain on the tin roof and talked quietly about past births. My fourth labor had been the hardest—three days long, a baby in a difficult position, nearly a transport. Three weeks earlier, while praying, I had confessed to Dan how afraid I was that this birth might follow the same path.

He patted my shoulder.

“Oh honey. After that last birth, you could do anything.”

I laughed at his optimism, but it steadied me.

We remembered out loud, each of our children, the details of their arrivals, the moments that had marked them.

“I want to do this with grace,” I told him. “So far it’s going well, but they’re still eight minutes apart. And they feel almost like transition.”

At eight o’clock I dressed the children, pausing every eight minutes to lean over the dresser.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” nine-year-old Helen asked again and again.

“Yes,” I said, smiling. “I’m just going to get the baby today. He’s trying to come.”

We bundled the children off to Grandma’s. It was February 1st—my due date.

While Dan left with the kids, I set out snacks and tidied small things, marveling at how much time seemed to stretch between contractions. They dipped to six minutes for an hour, then widened again.

“I’ve never had a labor like this,” I told my mom when she arrived. “But I almost feel complete.”

“I’ll bet you are,” she said calmly.

“I’m not going to push yet,” I told her. “I’ll wait for the urge. I’ve been sick. I’m wrung out.”

The room gradually filled—Mom, Angie, Noa, and Theresa, moving about quietly, efficiently. As a midwife, I knew every sound, every setup, every motion. As a laboring woman, I surrendered to them anyway.

I leaned over the footboard of our longleaf-pine bed and yielded to the rising urges with some deep groans.

Then there was a knock at the door.

“Who in the world would that be?” Dan said, hurrying to answer.

The rain had settled into a steady rhythm now, soft but persistent.

He came back grinning. “It’s Destiny.”

“Oh no,” I groaned.

Destiny was sixteen. We’d befriended her, and just the week before she’d told me she didn’t want me doing all the work of mentoring her. Could she come help out? We’d agreed she could come Thursday mornings to bake bread and clean with me. I’d completely forgotten! It was her first week, and I was in labor.

“She was so excited the baby was coming, she could hardly contain herself,” Dan said.

Thunder rolled faintly in the distance.

“I hope she has a ride back home…” I was interrupted by the next contraction. “I think I’m ready,” I huffed.

Things moved quickly then. I remained in the recliner and yielded fully as my fifth child slipped into the world—into his grandmother’s hands. She placed him on my chest.

I looked down at his wrinkled little puppy face, his dark, silky hair still wet.

And just then, the sun broke through the clouds outside the window.

That was when I saw it—a small patch of silver hair.

“He has a sunbeam on his head,” I said, nodding toward both the light pouring in and the pale streak in his hair.

“He’s a marked man,” Dan said quietly.

The next morning we named him Christopher Aaron—Christ bearer, and light. Dan sat beside me and read softly from Scripture: “I bear on my body the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:17). The word marks there is the same word we use for stigma, though Paul spoke of it not as a wound but as a sign of belonging. Lying there with our son warm against my chest, the room still reverent from his birth, I felt the weight of that word in a new way—not as something to be feared, but as something God might use to tell His story.

Light had broken through after the storm on the day he was born. And he was our only child born in the daytime.

We had no idea then what lay ahead.

The producer had been right. It would be a story.

Not the kind that could be captured on film or neatly narrated. But a life marked—bearing something often called a stigma, something misunderstood and heavy. And yet, over time, that mark would become for us a sunbeam of light.

A story still unfolding.