Mary Pondered These Things In Her Heart

Mary did you know…when you kiss your little baby, you kissed the face of God? 

Mary was visited by an angel and told that she would be the mother to the Savior.  She was going to bear a son-a son that would live a perfect life and then die on the cross.  She held her savior in her arms.  She rocked him to sleep and fed him when he was hungry.  I can only imagine what Mary must have felt.  Mary knew her son was God, but I don’t think she knew all that that would entail-the endless joy and grief that would bring.

“When (the shepherds) had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told the about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.  But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”  Mary didn’t have a camera to capture Jesus’ first days, steps, or smiles, but I’m sure she remembered them all.  I see babies born everyday at work, and every experience is different.  But one thing is the same-the look of wonder and joy on a new parent’s face when they look at their baby.  I went in to check on a patient the other day and found her just looking at her daughter like she was the only thing in the world that mattered.  Imagine Mary in that situation.  She was holding her first son, and she was holding God.  She was literally looking at the only thing in the world that mattered.

There’s a song that I like called Be Born in Me sung by Francesca Battistilli.  In it there’s the line  “I’ll hold you in the beginning, you will hold me in the end.”  When Jesus was born Mary held him and comforted him.  When Mary died she went home to be with her Savior and I’m sure he held her as she had once held him.  I can’t imagine the joy Mary felt when her son was born.  I can’t imagine the grief she felt when he was killed.

Mary had been told by an angel that this was what she had been called by God to do.  She must have felt fear and experienced ridicule (because who on earth would have believed her.)  She must have felt joy and awe, wonder and confusion.  But despite all of this she accepted God’s will, no matter how hard. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.”  It’s hard to wait on God’s timing.  Sometimes it’s hard to do what he is calling us to, or to do what we know he wants.  But in the end, it’s all worth it.

Powerful God, Little Baby Jesus

Psalm 139 is (as I’ve observed) one of the most beloved Psalms.  I know that it is certainly one of my favorites.  At the center of the message is the fact that God knows everything about us-our thoughts and actions.  There is nowhere that we can go to get away from God, and nowhere we can hide.  He created us.  He knows our past and our future-he knew all of the days ordained for us before one of them came to be.  And this isn’t true for just one of us, but for all of us over the entire earth.  God’s thoughts outnumber the grains of sand and still he thinks of me!  Not from this Psalm, but we know that God holds our tears and knows every one of them.  To me, this is an extremely comforting thought.

During this Christmas season we can be amazed at thinking of this powerful God who knew everything, created everything, to thinking about the little baby he became.  God chose to leave his throne and the knowledge of everything, and come as a baby who needed to learn everything and depend on sinful, broken parents to survive.  Did Jesus, being fully God, know every one of his parent’s sins and choose to obey his parents anyway?

Psalms 139 starts by saying that God has searched us and knows us.  It ends by asking the almighty God to search us, know us, test us, and lead us.  As I marvel over baby Jesus this Christmas season, I know that he knows the very core of who I am.  He knows my sin, my grief, my joy, and still chooses to love me.  Because I’ve acknowledged him as savior and asked him into my heart, I know that I am saved.  God looks at sinful me and sees pure Jesus instead.  How can I help but worship him?

Our God is a God of Miracles

Our God is a God of miracles.  This is a phrase I recently read in a book by Karen Kingsbury.  Which is funny because earlier today I was thinking about a question they asked us at the end of confirmation (when I was in 7^th or 8^th grade).  Talk about random…

The question was something along the lines of “What is something that you consider a miracle?”  At the time, I wrote down that a baby was a miracle.  This is very true-I mean think about it.  How do our bodies form exactly the way they’re supposed to the majority of the time.  If something was even the tiniest fraction off from the way it’s supposed to be, life wouldn’t exist.  We have exactly the right level of acids/bases in our cells.  We hold the only temperature that we could survive at.  Our cells couldn’t survive on their own and yet they come together to make a human that can think, feel, read, write, or encourage.  I work as a labor and delivery nurse, and trust me, hearing babies take their first breath and cry for the first time is one of the greatest miracles there is.  We were after all, knitted together perfectly in our mother’s womb.

So my answer back then was true.  But I was so narrow minded-I’m sure that about half the people in my class had the same answer because that’s the cliché, “Babies are miracles.”  Honestly, I remember thinking that that was the only thing I could think of.

If I had to the answer that question today, I have no idea what I would say, and not because I can’t think of anything.  I was driving home from today and thinking about that question and about the possible answers.  A rainbow is a miracle.  The water bends the light just perfectly to send bands of color across the sky.  Snowflakes are miracles.  Every snowflake is different and if you’ve ever seen pictures of snowflakes up close-you know what I’m talking about.  The mountains are miracles.  Someone seeing that God is real and giving his or her life to follow him is a miracle.  It says in the Bible that we can only see God and know that he is real when he removes the veil from our eyes.

There are endless miracles all around us.  Miracles happen every single day. We just have to open our eyes to the possibilities that simple things count as a miracle.  Miracles aren’t always big and flashy.  They aren’t always unexplainable. (Many of the things I wrote about above can be explained by science, but that doesn’t make them any less of a miracle.)

Friendships

A year ago my best friend moved away-and I don’t mean that know we just live in different towns, but now we live over 17 hours away from each other (by car).  During our senior year of college, when I learned she was moving, I was heartbroken.  I had friends in high school but none even compared to the friendship that Stephanie and I shared.  She said she would move back to Iowa (and it’s still a possibility) but even then I knew that she would get new friends, get a job, join a church, possibly meet a boy that would grow into a relationship that would make her want to stay there…in short, she would start a new life there.

I’ve been praying for months that God would send me a friend, one that lives in the same town as me, who becomes as good of a friend as she is.  Other than my husband, she still is my closest friend, but it’s hard to stay in touch.  We don’t talk very often because neither of us is very good at just picking up the phone and calling each other.  But also, when you live that far apart and don’t share life anymore it takes a lot of work to stay close-you’re life experiences are different.  She went to grad school, something I never did.  I got married, something that’s still in her future.  We both grew up and changed and we didn’t do it by each other’s side.  Don’t get me wrong!  As I said we are still very good friends; it’s just different than before.

As I’ve been praying for a friend, I’ve started to ponder what made us such good friends.  Living together for four years certainly had something to do with it.  We were put together as random roommates as freshman through some weird circumstances.  And even though we weren’t much alike, we started to form a friendship at some point that year.  I’m someone who keeps to myself and would consider myself shy in many circumstances while she is very outgoing and willing to try new things, so it was through her that I started to hang out with friends and make memories.  This means that when she stayed up until 2 in the morning on a Friday night, I did too.  We shared walks and nights out with friends.  As I stated before, we simply did life together.  But I think it’s more than living together.  After all, many people live together and just get annoyed and mad at each other.

During our freshman year, Stephanie began to introduce me to Jesus and at the beginning of our sophomore year I began to grow in a relationship with him.  I remember coming back to our dorm room on Tuesday and Thursday nights and before starting homework we would talk about what each of our small groups had talked about that night.  On Wednesday’s we talked about what God was doing in the lives of kids at church, on Sunday’s we came home from church and talked about how the service had touched us in some way.  We confessed sins to each other; we shared joys, and sorrows, struggles, and triumphs.  And we gave all the glory to God.

This is what made us so close.  God gave us our friendship, and grew us in our relationship with him at the same time.  So I’m still praying for that friend.  I won’t share the experience of literally living with a stranger who becomes a friend again, but I still have God.  God can bring me a friend who I am willing to share everything with again and by sharing life, I can gain another friend.  Stephanie and my husband will always be priority relationships that I cherish and can’t wait to grow, but I think there’s room for more.  I just have to wait on God and be willing to also put effort into the other relationships I already have.

Just Keep Going

2 Corinthians 5 says that “as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience, and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God…”  You get the point.  No matter what we are going through in life, we need to commend ourselves to God.  The word “commend” means to represent as worthy, qualified, or desirable or to express approval of, praise.  No matter what we go through in life, we need to praise God and represent him as worthy.

We all go through good times and bad.  I’m sure that the “bad” times in my 23 years are nothing compared to the “bad” times of people around the world.  I’ve been fed, clothed, cared for, loved, and educated.  And that’s just the beginning of my blessings.

We were going through 2 Corinthians 5 in bible study a few weeks ago, and we were talking about how so many people just coast through the good times in life; a good time comes and we relax.  God is taking care of us, life is good, and we forget (or choose not to) read our bible and get lost in prayer.  I know that when I’m going through a tough time, I turn to God.  I pray to be comforted.  I pray to be loved, and held, and I pray for God to take the hurt away.  When life is comfortable I don’t think about God half as much and just go about my daily life.

Now obviously this isn’t the way it should be.  We should look to God everyday, no matter the circumstances.  I was thinking about this hill by my parent’s home that I rode my bike on everyday one summer in high school.  We live back in a little neighborhood that there is only one way out of, so that’s the way I rode everyday.  But this route out of the neighborhood, requires you to go down one hill and then immediately up another.  At the beginning of the summer I would coast down the hill and then struggle up the other side.  The hill was big enough that sometimes I had to get off my bike and walk it up to the top.  After a few days or weeks though I realized that if I pedaled while I was going down the hill, if I built up enough speed, then I could make it to the top of the next hill and stay on my bike.  It was exhilarating pedaling myself faster down the hill, and I could make it to the top, but it still wasn’t easy.

That’s the way our faith should be.  We can’t just sit back and enjoy the ride when life is good.  Instead, we need to read our bible and continue to pray.  This way when the tough times come we have our sword ready.  We continue to work through the good times and even though the bad times are still a struggle, they become doable, bearable.  Making it a habit to seek God in the good, means we’ll be that much more likely to do it in the bad.

“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.  Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.  In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.  Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” ~Ephesians 6:13-17

The Little Things

How do you enjoy God?  Is it through music?  Is it through nature?  Is it through the job you do?  Is it gardening, reading, building something?  There are a million ways to enjoy God.  For some people it’s in a group of people, for others it’s when they can go off by themselves and just sit.  No matter how you enjoy God, alone or in a group, we all need community.  We’re made for fellowship.  We’re not made to do things by ourselves.  Sometimes it takes me a lot of effort to get off the couch and go do things.  Now, I might be lazy, but that’s not what I mean.  I mean the effort to leave the house, the effort it takes to be around people for me is enormous.  I go to church, I go hang out with friends, and I come back exhausted.  Being around people just takes a huge effort.  And yet I do it…and often come back encouraged.

Believers are meant to get together with other believers.  We are meant to get together in church, and when one person is missing, it is noticeable to someone in some way.  Some people are discipled; others do the discipling.  I think we need both in our life-we need to both teach and be taught.  One-on-one time is something that is dear to my heart.  This is the way I’m encouraged the most-to get close enough to someone older who can give advice that you are willing to share almost anything.  In the same way, I want someone younger (at least younger in faith) to look up to me.  I want them to feel comfortable enough to open up to me and listen to any advice I can give.

Enjoying God is one way that Christians live in light of the gospel.  Another way that we live in light of the gospel is living to show Christ to others.  There is song that’s a few years old called “Live Like That.”  There is a line in that song that says “If others pass and they don’t know my name, will they know that I’ve been changed?”  This line has been on my heart a lot lately.  Do the people around me know that there is something different about me, even if they don’t know me that well?  Do they see and wonder what I have in my life that gives me joy and hope?  I hope so.  One of my prayers for the past few months is that either make a difference in peoples’ lives (doing something little like listening when they need it, picking up something they dropped, etc) or if I’m already doing that, that God would show me those times that I make a difference.

I want to live in light of the Gospel.  I want my life to be a testimony to what I believe.  I want people to know that I’ve been changed.  I want to enjoy God in so many different ways, and live my life for him.