Last night, I watched the first episode of Call the Midwife with Anna. I enjoyed it a lot, but it did remind me of what a truncated version of pregnancy and childbirth TV and movies give. When Anna was pregnant with Peter, we took a childbirth class at the hospital, and the one thing I really took away from it was this: childbirth is long.

It never is, onscreen. Her water breaks, she breathes fast, she’s in pain and screams a lot, and boom: baby. It rarely takes longer than a few minutes of screen time. Sure, you hear about extended periods of labor, but it usually comes across either as exaggeration or exception.

But no: labor is, strictly on average, the affair of an entire day (or night). The mom-to-be has endured three quarters of a year of pregnancy, and now It’s Time – which means hours upon hours of early labor, culminating in (potentially) hours of pushing until the Big Moment. In retrospect, it’s a blur, but at the time it seems like a pretty grueling race to the finish line, one it would seem only fair to get to skip after so many months of frantic preparations and general inconvenience.

I bring this all up as a labored (sorry) analogy for where we are right now. Support raising is over, praise God! That process is, in its way, like a pregnancy: uncomfortable and tiring, but necessary to prepare us financially, emotionally, and spiritually for the new phase of life to come – not to mention that at the end, we were really wondering how much longer we’d have to wait (granted, support raising could easily have lasted 19 or 29 months as easily as 9).

Now is a mad rush to the finish, which is of course really the start. I don’t mean to push the analogy too far here – while picking a shipping company isn’t my idea of a good time, we’ll hardly need an epidural to get through it – but very suddenly, we are no longer wondering how long we’ll still be in the States (we fly out August 13th); we’re just trying to hang on and get through an exhausting gauntlet to get to the start of something new.

This is why, if you see us and ask if we’re excited to be done with support raising, we say (truthfully!) yes, but we may look and sound ever so slightly frazzled or preoccupied. There are wills to have drawn up and witnessed, retirement plans to enroll in, shipping companies to call for quotes, boxes to repack, possessions to sell, and churches to visit and friends and family to spend evenings with one last time. There’s a whole new to-do list waiting for us in Berlin, too.

And yet, of course, there’s the baby – the city, in this case. The hard part will just be beginning when we get there, but we will be there, field missionaries again, with a church to serve and neighbors to reach, doing what we believe God made us for. Even on our worst days, we know that’s a gift beyond price.

-Ben