All creation groans as it waits for renewal

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

— Romans 8:22

With a week of treacherous hot weather, a mild earthquake trembling by Lake Michigan, and wildfire smoke from the Canadian border you could cut with a knife, it makes me want to agree with the Apostle Paul: all creation is groaning.

One thing I know about, it’s groaning. My experience as a labor and delivery nurse exposed me to plenty of that. Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a laboring mother knows that her groans can be pretty agonizing.

Maybe you’ve never had the experience of being next to a woman in labor. Maybe your experience with groaning was going through your own aches and pains.

Either way, I think you’ll agree, groaning is usually a sign of someone going through a painful experience.

As we look around us and experience nature's turmoil and its destructive effects, it’s obvious that all created things suffer a shared misery of pain and disorder. This is a result of Adam and Eve’s sinful act of eating the forbidden fruit.

Because of Adam and Eve’s original sin, every part of God’s creation was subjected to the sin curse. Adam's punishment included thistles and prickly thorns growing, and weeds replacing a fertile, green land. If that wasn’t enough, due to that one sinful mistake made by Eve, all of her daughters have labored painfully in childbirth.

Paul tells us that as a woman travails in labor in hopes of giving birth to a new life, all of creation groans awaiting God’s promise of his blessed earthly renewal.

It will take a supernatural act of God to happen. But, in the meantime, when we agonize along with creation’s groans, we are to rest assured God’s promise of a renewed earth is getting closer.

• Annettee Budzban is a Christian author of the book “Letters To A Friend,” speaker, life and writing coach and nurse. She can be contacted at annetteebudzban@aol.com.