I am a sucker for birth stories. I mean, if you have a kid and we're sitting down to eat, I don't care if I don't even know you that well yet. I know birth stories kind of get into our personal business in a way that we don't normally go to those parts of who we are very often in polite conversation. But it's like when it comes to bringing babies into the world, it's all just fair game. And we talk about how it all went and the pressure and the stress and the

memories. Birth stories always have all these little tiny details that on any other day you would

forget that so-and-so said this or so-and-so said that. But on a birthday, like a first birthday,

everything gets recalled. Our birth stories from our three kids, I love telling people those when they're polite enough to listen.

Because it makes my wife and my kids look awesome.

That mom and that baby, they had to fight together to make life happen.

And that ordeal is a metaphor, not just for coming into the world, but it's a metaphor for the hardest things we go through in life.

Yeah, I could go on and on how proud I am of my wife for locking in being an Amazon warrior

and delivering life to my children. I really do love these kind of stories, but there's a reason

I'm bringing this up. And that is that birth stories, in addition to just being enchanting and

fun and awesome,

historically they've been regarded also as something that can give us a sense of what is to come with the one who is being born. Now, in a pagan sense, we're talking about omens or portents of things to

come, but this isn't just a pagan thing. This is also a biblical thing. There was an assumption

in the mind of the people of God that from time to time, God would ordain that a certain person

would play a certain role, a great role, and that how they were brought into the world would

tell part of that story. So outside the Bible, we get these

sort of legendary birth prologs from people like Julius Caesar, Cyrus the Great, Sargon

of Akkad. But in the Bible, we get these great birth prologues and early childhood prologs

with characters like Moses and Jacob and Esau, how they were born.

That tells a story.

And relevant to our conversation here about the Gospel of John, there's a great birth

prologue with John the Baptist that we've been working on for the last couple of days.

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