From the Womb of the Dawn

A Rock of Remembrance

December 10th, 2009.

Spending some late morning time with God, thanking Him for my growing relationship with Eden and pondering what might lie ahead. I’d just booked flights back to Uganda via Maryland so I could spend two weeks with Eden and her family over the New Year break before she returned to Ohio for the final semester of her INSIGHT studies.

There was a lot on my mind, but the main thing was simple enough:

Me starting to hope again big-time.

For a man who had his hopes for a healthy marriage and family life with his own offspring smashed once against his will, that is no small thing.

As I prayed God got serious with me.

He began pressing me to be properly honest with Him about what I actually hoped for as a man.

“What do you really WANT Andrew?”

Not the tidied-up Christian answer, the detached “whatever You want, Lord” answer.

The honest one.

What finally came out of me was this:

Yes Father, I really want to be a father too, not only a husband.

Three or more children, to be straight with You.

And since we’re being so honest, I might as well say it plainly:

I REALLY WANT A SON.

Blurted out much louder than expected because of the level of resistance fought.

This may sound odd to some, but the scary vulnerability of my confession was strangely healing.

When a man has already had that dream crushed once, it feels risky to dream again. Add to that several years of well-meaning people telling you not to be too picky, not to expect too much, and maybe to accept that those sorts of hopes are probably behind you now that you’re past 40 — that will grind a man down. It teaches him to keep his deepest desires half-hidden. Even from God.

But the Lord had been showing me that He delights in His adopted sons. That the fact we don’t deserve His gifts doesn’t diminish His love — if anything He delights to reveal His love for us all the more.

So I finally told Him the truth of my heart, knowing He was sovereign over it. Whatever He gave me, or did not, would in the end be the best thing.

I was about to follow my reading plan by opening to Psalm 10 when I felt a very strong nudge in my spirit to read Psalm 110 instead.

So I did.

Not because I could remember what was in it. I wish.

The whole of 110 is striking, but my eyes were drawn especially to verse 3:

“Your troops will be willing on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy majesty,
from the womb of the dawn
you will receive the dew of your youth.”

At first I found myself praying that I would be one of those willing soldiers on the day of battle.

But then the phrase “womb of the dawn” caught my notice.

Straight away I remembered what Eden had once told me her name meant in Chinese, and how “dawn” had already come up around her a couple of other times in our history so far. I thought too of Eden’s love of children, and of her spoken desire to bear them one day.

Then I glanced at the footnote in my Bible for the phrase “you will receive the dew of your youth” and saw the alternate translation:

“your young men will come to you like the dew.”

And this was just moments after I had finally admitted to God that yes — I really did want not only a wife, but children too.

Especially a son/s.

One year later we’d been married three and a half months, and my wife was carrying a nine-week-old baby.

We’d originally planned not to find out the gender until delivery, but because so many people were confidently predicting a girl, we eventually gave in and checked.

I already knew in my heart it was a boy.

I’d been saying so whenever anyone asked.

After all, every other detail had unfolded as God had told me, despite my interfering unbelief along the way.

Our young man was coming to us from the womb of my beautiful dawn.

Looking back in 2026, I still smile at the generosity of God, because it did not stop with one son. In December 2025, fourteen and a half years after our first, our second son made his entrance. I remembered, during the years our fabulous 3 girls arrived, that Psalm 110 had said sons, not son. Another boy was coming. All eleven healthy pounds of him :)

That does something to your heart.

Not because it means God gives us everything we ask for in exactly the form we imagine.

But because it reminds me that He is not embarrassed by honest desires.

Sometimes He’s the One drawing them out in the first place.

This is one of my Rocks of Remembrance now:

God asked me to stop hiding behind cautious spirituality and tell Him the truth.

Then He answered me from His Word with more tenderness and specificity than I would ever have dared script for myself.

He was not put off by my desire.

He met me in it.

Once again, He proved faithful to His word.