Travail

The word travail is often found in context with the words labor, sorrow, anguish, pain, and vexation. Travail, of course, refers to birth pangs, to the experience that a mother undergoes in the hours immediately prior to giving birth to a child. This hard labor is necessary in order for the child to be born. Scriptures use the term in the literal and figurative senses. In both usages, three features stand out: 1) As the time of deliverance approaches, the pains come closer and closer together;...