Reformation: The Labor Process

          As a woman who has been married for thirteen years and with her husband for twenty, my process of reformation began at the mark of recognizing the necessity for it. It was a rebirth of understanding that I needed a complete dependency on God himself. My husband, whom God ran after, hunted down, and then tackled in the spirit, emerged as a sexy beast fit for reigning over kingdoms. As a result of his reformation, the queendom I so happily assumed I held was broken down by a swift flood of King-like fire and destroyed. I emerged with a queen status complete with a new crown.

                  Our experiences left us with an intention to eliminate our old ways of thinking, living, and fake ways of “being in love.” It eliminated our falsehood of fidelity and our idiosyncratic ways of doing things that sometimes left the other person completely empty. These experiences of life that we so desperately lived unbeknownst to ourselves, was simply a prerequisite to the reformation that was coming all along. We have died to ourselves. For years, for months, for days, for hours, for minutes, for seconds we have been in labor. We have labored in a spiritual complex that didn’t come with an exact date of birth or time of arrival. We have been breathing in a staccato-like fashion without a laimaz class capable of teaching us the proper technique for breathing. We have been in the process of giving birth not knowing we were pregnant. We have been living a fairytale life filled with false promises that appeared to be real because of the mirror like world that told us we were fine and to just breathe.

                 Our relationship filled with marital symptoms of world compliments embedded our thoughts and buried our hearts under token appreciation methods of marriage. Due to the necessary process of being in labor, which is an acknowledgement and naturally spoken, yelled, screamed, grabbed expression of pain we now recognized our labor process. We didn’t know we were pregnant. We didn’t know we were being reformed. We didn’t know our bodies were being altered. We didn’t know our hearts were being formed. We didn’t know our limbs were growing. We didn’t know our skin was being purified. We didn’t know our minds were being recalibrated. We didn’t know our process of reformation had begun until we were transparent with the very One Who created us from birth.

            Reformation is the process of transitioning to a new state of structural and spiritual realignment with the father, my God, our God, the God. As a result of the process of reformation, my husband’s heart is a place I find refuge because that is the place from which our Creator withdrew me. We have been in relationship labor and recently gave birth to a beautiful baby. “Congratulations,” says the world! The infancy of our reformation is so pure that our skin, heart and mind is spiritually translucent. Our love for one another is the beat of the blood that causes the heartbeat. Our sexual encounter is the rush of the climax before the thought of the reality. Our spiritual connection is the unimaginable and unseen inhale before a breath is actually taken.

               We no longer finish each other’s sentences; we are the sentence. This place of relationship reformation is a hard re-set that no longer remembers the hard drive that wired our make up before. It’s like an awakening that can’t remember the slumber. It’s like a life that doesn’t remember the process of birth. It’s like a mother that forgets the pain as soon as she yells the last and final pain-filled breath to give birth. It’s like the last statement the doctor says during a c-section, “ok. You are going to feel a lot of pressure,” right before the baby is peeled out of the mother’s womb. REFORMATION. REFORMATION. REFORMATION. My husband and I have been reborn and it is an experience like no other.

-Jamila Thomas