Ever since Adam and Eve’s fall into sin, pain has been an unavoidable part of childbirth. Even with epidurals and Lamaze breathing techniques, God’s curse remains: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children…” (Gen. 3:16, ESV). I always believed these words pertained strictly to the pains of labor and delivery. Yet since my ordination, my understanding of “pain in childbearing” has enlarged to include all the years of childhood even beyond birth. I hear the pain of childbearing in a mother’s quivering voice when she speaks of her child’s battle with autism or an incurable digestive disorder. I see the pain of bringing forth children in a father’s face after he bails his teenage son out of jail or discovers that his daughter has been raped. And from what I can tell, the pain does not end just because a child turns eighteen and becomes an adult.

It is never painless to bring a child into the world, neither for the mother nor the father. It is among life’s most difficult experiences, and yet, as I am beginning to discover, nothing else comes close to the fulfillment and pleasure of parenting.

My wife Lisa and I first experienced this strange mixture of pain and pleasure during the first week of our son Benjamin’s life. He had a rocky start in this world and almost didn’t make it, but the Lord was faithful and preserved his life.

Lisa was induced for labor the day after her due date. In the baking, mid-August Colorado heat, she was ready to push him into the world and get her “bun” out of the oven. Of course, even after the Pitocin, there would still be several hours before the pushing phase. So in the meantime, we tried to fill the wait by holding hands and praying together. My father and siblings dropped by to offer encouragement and support. We finished out the wait by reading several scriptures that speak about the blessing of children: Psalms 127, 128, and 131, Mary’s Magnificat, and Zechariah’s Benedictus. Through this entire time, all the natal monitors indicated that our unborn son was healthy and doing fine. His heart rate was good, and there were no indications of fetal stress.

Then shortly after midnight on August 15, Lisa was ready to push. She squeezed my hand and tightened her face through each contraction. So concentrated were her efforts that she barely screamed or moaned. All her energy was exerted for the pushing.

About thirty minutes into the labor, the doctor exclaimed that she could see hair on our baby’s head. Lisa got excited and smiled through the tears. She too was born with a full head of hair! Sensing the end was near, she really started pushing. Then just after one o’clock in the morning our son was born. Tremendous joy and relief swept over Lisa’s face, and I broke into hysterical ­laughter.

I recall Jesus’ words: “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21). If the overwhelming joy did not replace the anguish, how could a mother even want to go through labor again for other children?

Benjamin came out with a full head of dark brown hair (nearly black) and his right fist pressed against his cheek. Already he was living up to the meaning of his name, “son of my right hand” (Hebrew idiom for “son of my strength”).

But almost at once, something was wrong. The doctor’s smile tightened into a grimace, and her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Benjamin did not come into the world kicking and screaming like most newborns. His arms and legs were inert, and instead of a hearty cry, only a low gurgle came from his throat. He could barely breathe on his own, and he was turning a purplish color.

The doctor quickly clamped off Benjamin’s umbilical cord and cut it before handing him off to a nurse.  There was no time for me to fulfill that paternal rite of passage. The nurse applied suction to his mouth and nose, but Benjamin still would not breathe.

The nurse placed the baby into Lisa’s arms for about fifteen seconds for that crucial first encounter between mother and child. But almost immediately she took him back and whisked him to the Plexiglas cradle across the room where he was surrounded at once by six or seven nurses who seemed to appear out of nowhere. Like guardian angels, they hovered over him with various instruments of healing. His skin, still wet with afterbirth, had darkened to a terrible blue. My heart filled with horror, fearing the worst. In my ministry experience, a blue baby meant a dead baby. I feared God was taking my son away before I could even hold him.

Two summers earlier I preached the funeral for a baby who died in the neo-natal intensive care unit. When we arrived at the NICU, the girl’s teenage mother clutched her dead baby, cold and blue, to her chest. She kept crying and kissing her, unable to let go.

The child’s grandmother said to me, “Pastor, don’t you want to hold her and bless her?” No, thank you, I did not. The tragedy of the situation and the otherworldly appearance of a blue baby horrified me. But I didn’t want to disappoint the family or let them down. So I placed my hand on the child’s forehead. I almost recoiled from the touch of her cold, blue skin, but somehow I kept my hand there and mumbled out a prayer.

Skylar was cremated, and I preached her funeral less than a week later. For two weeks after that terrible hospital visit, my dreams were dark and cold, full of blue babies and other dead children.

So two years later, when I saw my own son turning blue in front of me, I completely fell apart. I couldn’t believe I was losing him.

“Breathe, Benjamin!” I commanded him from across the room, where I held Lisa’s hand. “Breathe!”

“We’re at two minutes!” I heard a nurse say, and I looked at the clock on the wall.

Two minutes? What did she mean? The nurses continued to work on Benjamin’s little body, trying to push life into him.

“Three minutes!”

Then I understood. They were counting the time elapsed from his birth, how long he had been without oxygen! I squeezed Lisa’s hand, hoping she was unaware of how terribly wrong everything was.

In fierce silence, I prayed, “Lord, you brought him into this world. Don’t you dare take him out of it! You can’t take him away from me!”

During Lisa’s pregnancy, the reality of Benjamin’s growth and development was an abstraction for me. I never could feel him kick in utero because of the placement of Lisa’s anterior placenta. Despite the ultrasounds and “4D” imaging, it was difficult for me to sense a connection to the person growing in Lisa’s belly.

But now that Benjamin was out in the world, I seized on my new calling as father with a fierce and desperate love. From some unknown place, a power, force, or feeling took hold of me and awoke my paternal instinct and duty. Instantly overcome by an incredible love for this boy I had just met, I could not imagine life without him. I loved my son.

“Five minutes!”

And suddenly the nurses were wiping their foreheads in relief. “Okay,” one of them said, “let’s get him into the NICU.”

“Can I come?” I asked, and the delivery nurse nodded yes.

Lisa still hadn’t delivered the placenta, and the doctor was waiting for her to finish labor. I gave Lisa another hand squeeze and kissed her on the cheek.

“Good job, honey!” I said and hurried after the nurses to the NICU. As they put oxygen tubing into my baby’s nostrils and inserted an IV port in his arm, I felt so hopeless and useless, so completely out of place. As a pastor, I had spent plenty of time in hospital waiting rooms and patient rooms, including the ER and ICU. But never before had I been there as a patient’s despairing loved one.

“Can I touch him?” I asked one of the nurses.

“Yes, just don’t pick him up.”

A single light burned hot and yellow over Benjamin. His color was returning, and his skin wasn’t blue anymore. By this time, his head was inside a plastic humidifier puffing out a foggy mist, and his vitals beeped away on a monitor beside him. I stood at the foot of his little cradle and held his tiny feet. I didn’t know what else to do, so I gently rolled his pea-sized toes between my thumb and fingers and slowly massaged the arches of his feet. I was afraid to touch his fragile head and torso, nervous of the wires and tubing. So I just held his feet and prayed for him.

“Help me, Lord! Save him! Heal my son! Help him live.”

When the nurse came to check on Benjamin a few minutes later, I asked her if he was going to be okay.

“Can I say with 100 percent certainty that he’s going to be okay?” she said. “No, of course, I can’t guarantee that. But I think he’s going to live. His pulse and blood pressure are good. He has a good temp. He just needs a little help breathing with the oxygen right now.”

“What happened?” I asked. “How did things go wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Sometimes when babies are born, it’s just a complete shock to their system.” It is a strange world outside the womb.

I stayed with Benjamin for a long while, clinging to his feet. Yet without warning, a terrible feeling of hopelessness overcame me, and I rushed out of the NICU into the hallway, where I dry heaved and burst into throaty sobs. I leaned against the wall and sank down into a fetal position to cry, “Help me, Lord! Save him, please!”

It was at that point that I took out my cell phone and started dialing all my local area family and friends. My stepsister Kathy, who lives about thirty miles away, was the only one who answered at about two o’clock in the morning.

“Did the baby come?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“No. Something’s wrong with Benjamin. He’s in the NICU, and I’m scared.”

“Don’t worry, Chris. I’m on my way.”

I resumed my prayerful, tearful vigil over my son and waited for my sister. The nurse notified me when Kathy arrived about half an hour later. I went out to her in the hallway, and she hugged me.

“This is the scariest night of my life,” I said.

“It’s going to be okay,” she answered. “We’re praying for you guys.”

“Do you want to see him?” I asked. She nodded and followed me into the NICU. Once again I clutched Benjamin’s feet. Was he my anchor, or was I his? I couldn’t let him go. I wouldn’t let God take him from me, not yet.

My sister stood a little behind me and rubbed my back. “He’s a beautiful boy,” she said. “He looks like you.”

I held Benjamin’s little feet in my hands again. Kathy stood and watched us both.

After a while, Kathy suggested that we go back and check on Lisa. She’d been moved to a recovery room. Kathy and I both gave Lisa a hug and then sat on the futon in the hospital room. But all I could think about was Benjamin. I returned to the NICU until a nurse told me that I needed to get some rest.

“He’s in good hands,” she assured me. “And in a few hours he’s going to be hungry, and your wife is going to need a lot of help. So you better get some sleep while you can.”

I went back to Lisa’s room and after exchanging a tearful and grateful farewell with my sister, I rolled out the futon, turned down the lights, and collapsed into a weary and restless sleep.

When I woke around seven o’clock in the morning, the nurses informed us that Benjamin was making an amazing recovery and seemed to be doing just fine. His oxygen levels were almost normal. Around ten o’clock, they took him off the ventilator. I wheeled Lisa down to the NICU, and she held him to her breast while trying to get him to latch for nursing. We took turns cradling our son and speaking his name to him over and over. “Benjamin! Benjamin, I love you! You’re such a beautiful boy, Benjamin!”

Despite the IV tubing and my emotional exhaustion, I finally believed that Benjamin was going to be okay. The Lord had answered my prayers. Benjamin was going to make it!

Genesis 35 tells the story of another Benjamin’s birth. Jacob’s beloved bride, his favorite wife Rachel, labored in intense pains. And “she had hard labor.” What a terrible understatement! The pain was literally killing her, and Rachel died giving birth to her second son. So in her dying woes, she named him Benoni, which means “son of my sorrow” in Hebrew.

Many fathers might have blamed and resented their newborn for this loss. But not Jacob. No, he ransomed his son from the curse of his mother’s death and redeemed him by renaming him Benjamin, “the son of my right hand” or “the son of my strength.”

I am embarrassed to admit that when Lisa and I chose the name Benjamin for our firstborn, I had forgotten the narrative of the first child to bear that name. But my Benjamin also turned out to be a fighter. And when he couldn’t breathe on his own, the Spirit of God sustained him so that he could survive the night of his birth.

The next morning, the pediatrician said it was a “miracle” there were no lasting complications from Benjamin’s oxygen deprivation. Often a lack of oxygen at birth results in brain damage, cerebral palsy, seizures, or even death. Long-term effects can include epilepsy, memory problems, and lower intelligence. Benjamin suffered none of those side effects. Indeed, none of the doctors or nurses could explain his early breathing difficulties. Yes, his lungs were forty-percent full of fluid from the bag of waters, but so are many babies’ lungs when they are born. No one knows why it happened in the first place. And no one can say why Benjamin wasn’t burdened by any other problems. Now, in the doctor’s words, he was “perfect.”

Even if the medical community cannot explain my son’s miraculous recovery, I can and do. It is God’s answer to prayer, and not just to our prayers, but the prayers of all our friends and family who followed his recovery and hospitalization through social media. The New Testament says, “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (Jas. 5:16). On the night of Benjamin’s birth, the Lord listened to the powerful prayers of his saints. “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me” (Ps. 120:1). He gave me back my son, my Benjamin, the son of my strength.

As I write this, Benjamin is just over two years old. He is a healthy, energetic toddler, whose main activities are running, climbing, throwing, and breaking things. His personal motto is “Go, go, go!”, evidenced by the fact that his favorite toys are anything with wheels. Friends and neighbors often ask, “Does he always smile and laugh like that?” Benjamin’s first word, of course, was Dada. (He is the son of my right hand!) I never could have imagined the joy and wonder that my baby brings to my life. Becoming a father truly is the best thing that ever happened to me.

And yet I know that tough days lie ahead. Lisa’s pain in childbearing—and my own—are not at an end. As Benjamin grows, we will watch him fall and break bones, have his heart broken, and, Lord willing, grow into a godly man with a family of his own someday. This will not be easy, and the way will be full of dangers and temptations. “In pain shall you bring forth children.” Pain will always be a part of our children’s lives this side of heaven. Pain is more than an unavoidable part of life. It is the essence of life in a fallen world. 

Even Mary the mother of our Lord, when she presented the baby Jesus in the Temple, was told by Simeon, “A sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:35, NIV). But His time has not yet come. Birthing pains were hard enough for us; we’ll worry about “swords” later, as I must put Benjamin to bed.

Chris Matthis is the pastor of Epiphany Lutheran Church in Castle Rock, Colorado. He and his growing family live in Colorado with their three cats.