Mary, Did You Know?

It’s Advent and I’m sure nearly every Christian blogger is somehow writing about Christmas and I’m joining them for now.

It’s 3am on the 1st December. Why am I writing this now? Because while feeding Jaxon I was starting an Advent bible study. I have got so rubbish about reading my bible, so I decide to sort it. When Jaxon gets up for his night feed around 3am I read my bible and the devotional notes and I deal with it. If anything crosses my mind then I scribble it down before I forget or the “Christmas craziness” kicks back in.

There are to do lists in my head to be written, there are Christmas cards to write and presents to wrap but right now I need to get my heart right.

There’s lots going on in my life at the moment and my emotions are being stretched, bent and broken. But God is constant. At Church when I was a kid we’d sing a hymn:

Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift, and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift or firm remain?

We have an anchor that keeps the soul
Stedfast and sure while the billows roll,
Fastened to the Rock which cannot move,
Grounded firm and deep in the Savior’s love.
Found here

But does my heart cling to God in the storm? Sometimes I don’t think it does. I cling to the life raft of technology or my knowledge. I know in the past I’ve gone all out to hang on to God but I think too often I chicken out.

I got thinking about Mary this morning. You know the story but hear me out. Mary is going about her day to day life and an angel shows up to tell her that God thinks she’s the woman for the task and tells her she’s going to have a baby.

“Woah hold up!” You can imagine Mary saying. “Having a baby? But I’m not married and Joseph will dump me once he thinks I’m having another “man’s” baby.” And yet, she’s actually like “Okay, if that’s Gods plan then let’s do this thing”.

Now if God sent an angel to tell me I was having a special baby I think Chris would think I had officially lost it and would probably take me to the local psychiatric unit (not to mention the hundred of medical questions surrounding having a baby this close to Jaxon’s arrival and a C Section!). But rewind to when we were engaged. I can imagine that Chris would have questioned whether I’d been up to no good and things like that but we’d either have dealt with it by moving the wedding date forward or I would have done what was needed to bring up baby myself.

But God had that covered too and sorts out Joseph too.

Chris and I have trusted God for quite a few things since we’ve been married. A job for me when I was unemployed, the strength to look after Our Sidekick, the provision to get pregnant and then the finances to support our family not to mention other things.

So Mary steps out and says “if this is your plan God then I’m in, but you’ve got to help on the Joseph front” and God does because his “Save My People” plan needs full commitment from all parties.

So Mary Did You Know just what was going to happen to your baby?

Jaxon will go through heartache in his life I know that, he’ll fall in love and that girl might break his heart too. He’ll make and break friendships. His “big brother” will leave our home and (I hope) still have contact with him. But in a way these are all little things. I joke that Jaxon has figured out all complicated things like world peace and the cure for the worst sicknesses in the world but because he’s a baby he can’t explain them or write them down to share with people. I hope for him that he’ll find happiness in his future. That he might have his own family one day when God has got it planned for him. I hope that my Grandma is alive to give Jaxon the same advice that she’s given my cousins, my brother and I over the years. But in his life time he will lose his great grandparents just like I’ve lost mine. My Great Grandma for example would have been 100 in October this year.

Did Mary know that her little baby boy was sent on a rescue mission? That he’d go through the worst kind of death that the Roman World could throw at him and yet he would still go through it all because he was God incarnate, he was our superhero and he was here to save the day whether we accepted or not. He chose us before we even chose him. He came to mend a broken world. He came to father the fatherless.

Okay got to sleep now because my brain turns into mush. It’s a bit of a ramble but apart from tidying the formatting up a bit and making sure there’s a link to the hymn website this is how it came out of my fingers at 3am on the 1st December.