The doubled-over pain of unfulfilled hope stretches and contracts my soul with gut-wrenching force. The tears and sweat. The dread. The dust swirls that follow each scarce exhale from my nostrils. The stream of snot and salt connecting my face to the now grief-tattooed ground.

I have held stillborn dreams in my belly and delivered them, unformed, exposed, raw and lonely as death. Dead dreams passed through me. Changed me. Dehydrated my confidence in God. Just dry bones.

The swollen, fleshy vibrancy of love, refuge, relief, creativity, redemption—can’t see it with the sockets left after grief. What is hope if you can’t see it? Myth. Legend. Lie. As intoxicating as Eden; as impossible as resurrection.

I will surely die if I take hold of hope today, I think. I will surely die.

Hope is a repetitive movement, always toward life: a carrying and delivering, or a laying to rest. An Abel. A Cain. A risk; for between the two beloved sons, one was murdered and the other spared, but murderer. Holding on to hope in the face of death can be like bearing the tension of the possibility of new birth and the agony of betrayal and bereavement.

Eve, the mother of all the living, birthed humanity with pain. Birthed, in pain, humanity.

Her pain in childbearing teaches us all: teaching, first of all, that there is such thing as productive pain. The push, stretch, sweat and blood is part of the journey in becoming a deliverer. To live, costs. It’s worth it.

Here, in this space of pain and progress, hope is a midwife.

Fruitfulness, Eve teaches us, includes, but is not limited to, pregnancy. Perseverance is another kind of labor. The ability to push push push forward through disappointment, grief, and emptiness is sacred work. We are delivered as we are delivering. Eve knew death was coming, but she birthed Abel and Cain into a world of redemption, grace, and second chances—because even outside of Eden’s gates she held on to the hope that her world was not abandoned by the God who made her. Through her hope, God was her midwife.

Creating and continuing past the pain is an act of faith—the assurance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen. We carry and nourish plans, thoughts, ideas, relationships. We reconstruct life rhythms, expanding them to prepare to commune with an unknown and treasured future. We wonder whether it will live; whether we will live through it.

I wonder if the Lord gave women pain in childbirth because He wanted us to remember in our bodies the value of the life that comes through us. Maybe He wanted us to reflect an aspect of His image—His pain in bearing people who He so loved, yet who were compelled to find themselves apart from Him.

Perhaps God saw that the first woman had such audacious hope that all would be well—forbidden fruit or not—and His heart ached with both pride and sadness.

Or maybe God wanted us all to pay close attention: to see the pain, blood, and sweat, and to connect this to the glorious truth that a body just like ours held the Holy One, and safely delivered Him through painful childbirth, still flawless and holy, into the world. And He, even He, flawless and holy, would die in pain, blood, and sweat.

Maybe Jesus remembered/foresaw His tears falling on the grief-tattooed ground in the Garden of Gethsemane, bereft of hope. Feeling abandoned by His Father.

Maybe, women, He wanted us to remember, too, that he would surely die. That “be fruitful and multiply” ultimately meant more than an Edenic baby boom: it meant pain in being the firstborn of all creation, delivered out of death into resurrected life that will bring many sons and daughters to glory.