“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” Mary Ann Radmacher
I’m asking more and more to see the big picture. Distractions obscured my view for years. The eternal paraded nearby, unnoticed by me, while I tended to fires that only veiled the real deal.
I want what matters. Even when it shows up unannounced.
Mary might have been asleep when the angel, Gabriel, came to visit. She didn’t ask for the encounter. Even as love breathed into the air around her, the message confounded her young heart.
“Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will become pregnant and give birth to a Son and you will call His name Yeshua,” he said.
Still, Mary welcomed God. Angelic visitor, supernatural mission and impossible circumstances. Yes, to all of the above.
The sweetness of heaven’s visitor must have lingered. Did it stick around long enough to cushion the clash of incomprehensible meeting human reason?
Heaven defied the natural and inserted His plan on earth in baby form. All in the human package of a young woman called to carry God.
It was a profound, beautiful first fruit of His will for all of us. The mystery of imperfect people carrying a God treasure.
She couldn’t have known how much grace carrying that Treasure would require. It didn’t look like an assault at first. After all, it was her family. It was Joseph. But they didn’t understand.
Rejection has a hook. That hook is based on the fact we carry something that isn’t understood. It isn’t understood because it is God. Rejection must have hovered with its goon, shame, like a black cloud threatening to slime Mary and her treasure.
These babies are God plans that begin with a thought or desire. Sometimes they show up in our dreams. Many are aborted before they are known, denied before their beauty shapes our world in a new way.
Questions assail us like, “Who do you think you are?”
“You’ve tried and failed before, why is this time any different?”
“How important is this anyway? It’s so little and insignificant.”
Mary was a wise woman. She ran to her friend, Elizabeth. Elizabeth knew about supernatural babies. She carried one. She, too, was a forerunner who carried a child of the spirit, not born of the will of man, but of God.
Elizabeth friends are precious. They recognize the gift we carry when others don’t. They aren’t threatened by what they can not understand. They know a baby needs protection. That means caring for the momma.
Elizabeth was old. She was proof age has nothing to do with this birthing process. We can receive a God-baby at any age.
God things aren’t always understood. But in embracing them, we receive the potential to bring heaven to earth in flesh and blood reality. Did Jesus shape the world? Our babies will, too.
They need protection, they need care. But when they come to birth, God arrives on the scene. He may come in baby form, but that expression of heaven in us touches earth in ways we never expected.
Shalom,
Laurel Thomas