We'd love to pray for you, there'll be a Google form link to submit prayer requests by Monday 9/12/24 :-)
Christmas 2024
December 15th - 4:00pm - Nativity Service - A Family Friendly telling of the Christmas story! (no 10am service)
December 19th - 7:30pm Beer and Carols at Jacobs Well pub with Fountains Church in Bradford City Centre
December 22nd - 10am - Carol Service - A more traditional style of service, but still lots of fun!
December 22nd - 7pm - Community Carols (meet at church building)
December 25th - 10am - A short Christmas celebration of the birth of Jesus! We will share communion together
Note - no service of midnight communion or on Sunday December 29th.
A midwife's view of the birth of Jesus ....
(shared by Liz Lephard at the 2022 Nativity Service)
I’m a midwife in Bradford. I’ve looked after lots of different women. Women aged 14 to 44.
Women from lots of different countries, with all sorts of backgrounds, and so many stories.
Some births really stick in your head. My first twins. The very sad stories. Birth to a beautiful song. So of course at this time of year I imagine this particular birth. I imagine a midwife being called in the night, as she had been called so many other times, to meet this girl in this barn, ready to birth her child. And I imagine how it could have been if it had happened right here. I think of the reality of birth.
So imagine it’s nighttime - it’s 5am. I’m at work, under the same bright lights, and things have been steady; we’re all tired but we’re getting through our shift. I’m in the office when the security guard rushes through the door saying someone is about to give birth in the car park. It happens!
I’m asked to go, so I grab a birthing pack and some towels and head out of the back door. Someone else goes to get a wheelchair. The first thing I notice is how cold it is, in my scrubs. The second thing is that the woman isn’t by the door, as I’d imagined, having just got out of a car.
The security guard is leading me across the carpark to the other side near the footpath. I see a couple bent under a tree. I start to run, which is tricky in my crocs. As I get closer, I realise that they are very young. Not that it makes any difference at this point. I can hear him speaking a language I don’t recognise. As I arrive she looks up with relief. She has been leaning on this huge sycamore tree. Her glance changes and her eyes glaze with the shock of an overwhelming urge to push and I realise that this baby is arriving, right here onto this scrappy bit of grass. And I do my job. I manage to get a paper sheet on the ground and she shows me right there, his head coming, no help needed… she is steady and she breathes and then I see his head coming through; his face emerges and then I check and his chin is out, and as he turns she waits, exhausted, until with a powerful cry she pushes the baby slippery into my waiting hands. She has done it. I hold him firmly in a towel and rub dry his little body, his dark hair, his face, all of us waiting in those long seconds until his eyes focus and he manages a suck of air and we hear the release of his first miracle cry into the night. The relief floods. He cries and cries until we find her skin and amidst her own tears she finds her arms, and I layer towel upon towel and coat and scarf over his new body. I find I am shaking. The sound of muffled, shuddering sobs emerges from the man next to me too as his relief spills; it is done, this birth, this journey, this beginning.
The woman holds her son, exhausted, elated. The pain that coursed through her body has ended.
The wheelchair now comes clattering over the tarmac and I start to encourage her slowly, wobbly to her feet. She is just about able to sit in the chair. We tuck a jacket around her. Strands of limp hair hang loose from her ponytail, her body small in the night. I check her son’s face is free from the layers. He gazes, blurry-eyed, tight against her skin as we wheel past the cars, towards the flood of light. He must be hearing that beating heart so familiar, breathing in the mother so known.
As we near the door and the buzz of conversation, action, decisions, people, I have a sudden urge to linger here in the night a moment longer, with that young girl and her overwhelmed partner, in the cold, in the emotion, and in the peace that is starting to settle in the centre of their family.
Maybe it was like this for that midwife, that one long ago. Maybe she didn’t want to go home.
Maybe she felt something like joy, on the straw with that new mother. And I wonder if this was the story she never stopped telling. Because some births you always remember.