In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you! ”

Luke 1:26-28

Dear God, worshipping with Catholics every week has made me think about Mary a little more intentionally. It’s not that I personally believe anything about her that I didn’t before. I think my personal beliefs are still pretty standard for Protestants. But it has made me consciously consider what I do believe and how I feel about the role she played in my Salvation.

I would say the biggest thing is that as much as we say that our military lays down their lives for our freedom, both Mary and Joseph ended up sacrificing the rest of their lives, plans, and dreams to accept the responsibility of Jesus’ birth and childhood. They had to deal with pregnancy in Bethlehem (that census would have been a lot easier without that little wrinkle). They had to deal with shame in their society. They had to flee for Egypt in the middle of the night and start new lives there. They had to abandon those lives to move again, eventually ending up in Nazareth. They had the trauma of having lost the boy Jesus for a few days around Passover. And then Mary had a tough three-year stretch where she just didn’t fully understand what was going on with her grown son and eventually had to watch him be tragically killed. No, the mission (Baptists would call it a calling) that Gabriel gives her in this passage might not have been so readily accepted if she had known how hard it would be, but then again, you often obscure the pain of the path in front of us because if we knew then we might miss your glory that you have for us to experience on that path. And I’m sure, in retrospect, Mary and Jospeh wouldn’t trade the path for anything.

Father, thank you for what you did through those two simple people. Thank you for doing things through me. Thank you for keeping me on a need-to-know basis, and thank you for operating under the policy that I very rarely need to know. Help me to glorify you in all that I do, and let it be done to me as you will it.

In Jesus’ name I pray,

Amen