As the 7th of June approaches, my wife and I prepare to celebrate the birthday of our second son. He is a beautiful, mostly happy baby who is gradually learning to interact with a world that he isn’t really able to see as a result of damage to his visual cortex from a Grade IV intra-ventricular haemorrhage… and yet he still finds joy. Over the last twelve months I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve written a lot – from the shock of discovering his medical condition through the stages of processing what it all meant and receiving updates from various doctors, through two brain surgeries and three fluid taps to the confirmation of cerebral palsy on his left side and the likelihood that his vision is very low, if it is there at all – through all of this the (active) sovereignty of God really has been, as Charles Spurgeon put it, ‘the pillow on which the Christian rests their head’. Until now though, I haven’t written about something else that happened on the day our son was born. In some ways it was small, it probably only lasted 30 seconds, and yet it is burned into my brain and still boggles my mind. It was something one of the midwives said while we were waiting to go to theatre… but more on that soon…

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