Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light

Library Journal - Best Books of 2018

"To bring anything new into the world is to open one’s self and therefore to take on risk, to contaminate oneself with the other, to be made vulnerable. This requires not just courage but many things, among them faith, hope, help, companionship, grace—in a word, love." While living in one of the world's most impoverished countries, Rachel Marie Stone unexpectedly caught a baby without wearing gloves, drenching her bare hands with HIV-positive blood. Already worried about her health and family, Stone grappled anew with realities of human suffering, global justice, and maternal health. In these reflections on the mysteries of life and death, Stone unpacks how childbirth reveals our anxieties, our physicality, our mortality. Yet birth is a profoundly hopeful act of faith, as new life is brought into a hurting world that groans for redemption. God becomes present to us as a mother who consents to the risk of love and lets us make our own way in the world, as every good mother must do.