Now we come to the part of the story which is the hardest for me to tell, because it’s about me. So many things went into the decision I made that when I first tried to recount the decision making process, what I wrote was too overgrown and unwieldy, touching on everything related to my decision to have a baby, in short, pretty much every part of my life. Right now I’ll do my best to set forth a truncated version of the story, highlighting only the most pertinent elements. The summary of that story is this: I prayed a lot. The rest is pretty much just details.

Since I graduated from college, I’ve become more aware of my identity, both who I would like to be and who I really am. This identity crisis confronted me during the hard times Jeni and I had after moving to Edinburgh. I felt like I had lost track of myself and thought that, just maybe, I’d be better off back in the States on my own, being “just Matt.” At first I was worried that I’d lost part of my individual identity getting married to Jeni and moving to Scotland. But then as Jeni and I fought and talked and made up, I came to find that I no longer have a purely individual identity, but that Jeni and I are defined in terms of each other in community, as a family. Of course this knowledge was nothing new, I knew when we got married that we were entering into a new relationship with each other and with God that would leave neither of us unchanged, but I had held onto selfish desires, putting my own perceived self interest above that of our family.

Jeni approached me with the desire to have a child. This would be another change of identity, from husband to father. This got me thinking about my own father and who he was to me. Most important of all, my dad showed Christ to me. In his imperfect way my father submitted himself in service to the Lord and to his family. In that aspect my father was everything that a father should be, and I prayed about living like that for my children. I prayed a lot in the weeks when I made this decision, mostly that God’s will would be done in the decision I made.

While we’re on the subject, here’s a quick note on God’s will. I don’t believe that the will of God is a secret set of right decisions that you need to make in order to please him. I believe that God’s will for us is a way of life, a life of humility and submission in whatever decisions we make. Hence, when I prayed about having a baby I wasn’t asking God to show me which decision was the right one. Instead I prayed that he would conform me and the decision I would make to his will.

Ultimately, I felt that it was the right time for a child. Part of the reason was that the logistics seemed to work out right (I’ll go over that in the next part of the story), but mainly I wanted to add “father” to my identity. I hope that I can live out God’s will through submission to my wife and coming child. My own father was one of the most important people in my life, and I want to be that for our child. I figure it’s better to be the most important person in one child’s life than to be a world renowned musician or influential pastor or anything else.