THE PREGNANT CHEERLEADER

“The Pregnant Cheerleader”- Merry Monday by Parris Bailey
Song of Sol. 1:13 “A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En–gedi.”
I hate to be the typical stereotype but yes, I was the pregnant cheerleader. Although I might try to justify myself I will spare you. I wasn’t born again and, well, it was the 70’s. Oh, how I wish I could rewind the tape! But God has a way of dealing with us doesn’t He? I didn’t realize at 14 that I could really be pregnant and wasn’t until my mother took me to the doctor that I found out that I was already 6 months with child. Yes, cheering at my local high school the whole time I hid it well. By that January I disappeared from my freshman class and moved into a “home for unwed mothers” and attended a school in New Orleans for “unwed mothers”. I would say pleasant wouldn’t be the word I experienced the next couple of months. Everyday I would have to catch 3 buses to get to my school uptown. Seeing I was just 14, it was my norm to have a unusually high count of people staring and pointing at me. When or if I went home on pass I would have to lay down in the car so “the neighbors” wouldn’t see the pregnant cheerleader. I gave my precious baby girl up for adoption two weeks after I had her and despite my efforts haven’t seen her since. That sumer I took summer school to finish my freshman year. I not only tasted but swallowed the bitter pill of life and the school of hard knocks and I was determined not to “let that happen again”.
Just two years later I came to Jesus a broken down nothing of a teenager with absolutely nothing to lose. He took me in and that has been almost 40 years ago! He has become to me “that bundle of myrrh that lies all night between my breasts.” He comes to us in our night seasons and brings a sweet smelling incense to our pain and sorrow. We can join Joseph while he is down in the prison, forsaken and accused yet dreaming of better days. He gives us songs in the night, fills us with his grace and communicates Himself to us till the day breaks.
Where do you hold Christ these days? I pray you hold Him close as He holds you close, for “to them that believe he is precious”. The storms have come and gone through our lives but they can never take away what is hidden deep within. I have mothered four more beautiful children since that horrible year in 1972. And I have noticed when I hold my children or my precious grandchildren I bring them up close to me. Christ has become in us the “treasure in earthen vessels”.
Matthew Henry says, “There is a complicated sweetness in Christ and an abundance of it; there is a bundle of myrrh and a cluster of camphire. Christ lays the beloved disciples in his bosom; why then should not they lay their beloved Savior in their bosoms? Why should not they embrace him with both arms, and hold him fast, with a resolution never to let Him go? Christ must dwell in the heart, and, in order to that, the adulteries must be put from between the breasts, no pretender must have his place in the soul. He shall be as a bundle of myrrh, or perfume bag, between my breasts, always sweet to me; or his effigies in miniature, his love-tokens, shall be hung between my breasts, according to the custom of those that are dear to each other. He shall not only be laid their for a while, but shall lie there, shall abide there.”
Thank you Lord, you make all things new.