Aiden

I was never very good at public prayer. The words clotted at the back of my throat, or maybe they made it to the tip of my tongue only to sizzle into a puff of "um's" and "er's" when I attempted to roll them into life.

This all changed after Jesse and Jeni had been trying to have a baby for a year without success. God and I weren't exactly on speaking terms at the time. Or, rather, I'd been doing a lot of speaking without hearing so much as a whisper in response for a very long time. Gradually, I stopped speaking. But, I thought, maybe things would change between us if I kept bringing up the same topic sans relief until there was an answer. In short, in the spring of 2006 I decided to pester the hell out of God about it.

One year later, I held their son for the first time. Aiden looked at me with unfocus-y, newborn eyes. I imagine that he was thinking, "oh, look! a new face." Or something. But I looked right back at him, memorizing every fold of his scrunched-up face. Mouthing a silent "thank you" to whomever it was who was listening - God, mother nature, the inevitability of human reproduction given the right set of circumstances.

I'm beginning to pester God again, as Jesse and Jeni recently mentioned that they'd like to have another baby. Over the past few months God and I been talking more, and about topics that have nothing to do with Schoch family reproduction. There are still times when I seriously wonder whether I've just been talking to myself all of these years, of course, but there are other times in which it almost seems as if there's someone listening out there.