Two wombs One Purpose

“ Will you read the Bible while we eat?”  Mattox turned to the bag that sits by our kitchen table full of journals, bibles, and great books that I cannot part with to take all the way to the bookshelf.  With forks in hand, we started reading the story of Nicodemus.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a man of the cloth, you might say, a learned man who spent his life studying the law of God.  He had heard about Jesus, the man who performed miracles and he was curious to talk with him.  So, in the dark of night he slipped through the streets of Jerusalem to find Jesus.

Jesus tells him that he must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 
“What?  How can we be born again?”  Mattox scrunched up her nose and held her corn on the cob sideways to get a better view of the picture in the story.  “That is exactly what Nicodemus asked.” 

I explained the words of Jesus, rolling them around in my head while I broke it down for my six year old.  Born again, a spiritual concept, life from two wombs: a physical one and a spiritual one.  Born again: a requirement for peace, an invitation for eternal life.  

Nicodemus and Mattox wanted to know how they were supposed to crawl back into their mother’s womb to start life again.  How can we go backwards? How can we start fresh? how can we forget the life that we have lived and the mistakes that we have made.  How can we forget and start again?  How can we change that much? It seems too hard, an impossibility, to start again. 

I have a dear friend who is struggling with this now.  Too many mistakes have been made in life, hurt has changed her reality, and shaped her future.  Life has been hard at times, and left her feeling less than worthy to claim its goodness.  How is she supposed to forgive herself and forget?  How is she supposed to live this new life that Jesus is explaining?  How can she crawl back into her mother’s womb and start over? 

It seems impossible, like the Mount Everest of spiritual concepts.  It seems like that, until you start climbing.  One hand in front of the other, one foot planted solidly until the other one can find its place. 

Jesus was not giving an impossibility to a man in the middle of the night.  He was giving him hope, peace and a way out of the brokenness of this life.  He was offering him goodness that saves and restores.   To be born again.  To start fresh, to know peace for the first time in his life, to find that the hard of life, no longer consumes but stretches and causes growth, to experience a depth of understanding and love that no man alone is capable of doing, to find his purpose and to know the God of the universe. 

To be born again.  To start fresh.  To surrender and be called worthy of everlasting peace.