Encouragement along the way

And now, with Christmas day, we finally start the Christmas season. The waiting and unfulfillment of Advent are over. We have 16 days to celebrate the fullness of Christmas, from Christmas Eve through the Baptism of the Lord, this year on Jan. 9. Now, I feel like I can finally say it and mean it fully: Merry Christmas.

This year during Christmas, I have been struck by the ways God encourages Mary, helping her move forward in uncertain and unconventional circumstances. First, she finds herself pregnant as the stranger from God said she would. Then, the man she is marrying experiences a change of heart and tells her he believes her because of a dream he knows to be from God; he chooses to stay and cultivate an untraditional family with her. Next, her older cousin is pregnant like the stranger from God said she would be, and she prophesies when she sees Mary, confirming what the stranger said. They spend three months together as Mary learns about pregnancy and witnesses childbirth. This female fellowship must have filled Mary with the strength to return to her small town, where people may have had their own judgments about what was happening.

Then, Mary and Joseph travel while she is very pregnant to his hometown, and she must not have expected to have to give birth amongst animals in a barn. It seems scary enough, giving birth for the first time, not knowing what to expect; to have to do this basically outside in dirty circumstances next to animals must have been terrifying. Was Joseph the midwife? Or was there a woman from the inn or one of Joseph's relatives who had experienced childbirth before who was there to help her, to help them both? There must have been, right? Bringing cloths and water and pillows to coach her through while she suffered from labor pains, encouraging her, helping the baby become free. Announcing it was a boy. Another confirmation.

Were there complications? I want a nativity scene in which Mary looks disheveled like she's just given birth, hair askew and face splotchy, oh so beautiful in her joy, a baby that is still purple and cheesy, and a placenta piece to sit next to a shepherd. Give me the truth of childbirth, because God came to earth through the body of a woman, and I want the whole world to know and to remember the power of that experience, the power of that truth. There was blood and pain and screaming, concentrated breathing, and that, too, is where the glow-y light of halos comes from. Let us not sanitize it and so forget its meaning.

Or maybe Mary, free of original sin, was exempt from the full pains of childbirth, from the consequences of Eve's choice? Did the baby come from and through her less intensely, less painfully and with less work? Either way, one can't get around the physicality of blood and afterbirth. Isn't that incredible to think about? This is our confirmation, our encouragement along the way.

And then the shepherds and kings come to worship. What wonder this must have drawn Mary into, to see and hear this confirmation from God as she holds her baby, unsure of what is to come.

There must have been so many moments of wondering if she was doing the right thing, if her day-to-day experience was what God meant and wanted. God keeps giving her encouragement along the way, something to hold on to, yeses in reply to her yes. Yes, Mary. Keep offering your yes to me, and I will keep showing you.

In the day-to-day circumstances of our lives, our God still offers us encouragement to keep going when we ask him. Let us seek with faith the God who so deeply wants to be with us and let God surprise us in unusual circumstances with the whispers of his love.