Advent Week 4
Mary got up and hurried to a city in the Judean highlands. She entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. With a loud voice she blurted out, “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry. Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as I heard your greeting, the baby in my womb jumped for joy. Happy is she who believed that the Lord would fulfill the promises he made to her.”
Mary said, “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior. He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant. Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored because the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is his name.
Luke 1:39-49
I love revisiting these stories every year, though many churches have done away with walking through the Christmas story every December. There is comfort and kinship with the people and places that we know so well from these gospels. And after all, you couldn’t get to Easter without Christmas, so I plan to rejoice and be glad in this season every year.
God has blessed you.
God has blessed you.
God has blessed you.
God has blessed you.
And He blesses that which you carry.
Which begs the question – do you know what you’re carrying?
Mary carried the weight of the world within her. She was able to physically carry the burden of birthing the Christ child, of nursing and raising him. As a mom who is familiar with the trading of stories between moms, I would love to know more about that journey. We don’t hear about the things that were hard during her pregnancy – riding a donkey for days? We don’t hear about his potty training, his eating preferences or his first crush. But we know that she was blessed.
And we know that in the depths of who she was, she rejoiced in God. She glorified God. Mary was humbled, knowing the magnitude of the burden she so willingly carried.
Do you rejoice in what you carry? Do you glorify Him with it? I think sometimes that we’ve bought into a modern Western idea that we deserve a good life, full of happiness and void of difficulty – especially if we’ve professed faith in Jesus. That part should put us over the top. But if you’ve been around long enough you realize that there’s no free pass, no get-out-of-jail-free card.
And that fact doesn’t make it okay to grumble.
Mary was in a difficult situation – unmarried and at risk of losing her engagement to Joseph, disgracing her family, ostracized for standing in her belief of what an angel told her. But she didn’t say, ‘Yes, Lord,’ then bear the burden solemnly of fearfully. We don’t see fear in Mary. And maybe it’s there in the mystery stories we don’t get to hear until heaven. In the face of those obstacles, we hear that Mary rejoiced in the depths of who she was.
Do you know the depths of who you are? Because God does. And He rejoices over you, even when you don’t think He should. So maybe this week we pause and hold out our hands to ask Holy Spirit what it is that we are carrying. And even harder, to ask if we are carrying it joyfully to glorify the Lord.
God has blessed you and He has blessed that which you carry.
God of hope, who brought love into this world, be the love that dwells between us. God of hope, who brought peace into this world, be the peace that dwells between us. God of hope, who brought joy into this world, be the joy that dwells between us. God of hope, the rock we stand upon, be the centre, the focus of our lives always, and particularly this Advent time.
-Author Unknown
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