I knew it would be a difficult year.
Not difficult in any apocalyptic sense, though at times I did feel the end might be near. But from the end of last Advent until now, I have looked past the warning of the older generations of wisdom that surround me and have deliberately wished my time away. Forget pressing toward the mark of anyone’s high calling. I just really needed to get through this year. A year that was dark. A year marked by loneliness. A year filled with all things insurmountable.
And I knew it was coming. Words of wonder now float from the pages of last year’s journals with uncanny clairvoyance. My apparent ability to foreshadow drama could rival Shakespeare. I tried to prepare for what I knew would be a trying time in my own life, but I had little to go on. Nothing of hope, or growth, or the fruit to come. Just a promise of Immanuel, that God is with us. That God is with me.
Though I have never had children, the trials of this calendar year felt comparable to birth pangs. I can’t help but think that, no matter how many books you read, no matter how much you expect when you’re expecting, the actual experience of being pregnant and giving birth is incomparable to anything anyone can tell you. You know your nose will spread and your feet will swell. That random acne, indigestion, and receding hairlines are par for the course. That hormones will rage and random cravings develop. You know it is coming. You know birth and delivery is coming. And yet, you don’t really know the promise of what is to come. What is on the other side. What will be. You can’t see the fullness and grace of what is to come, because it is far beyond comprehension. And just when you, quite literally, think that you are going to burst at the seams from the pressure, it happens. A miracle. The moment of light that eclipses all the trials of the past, and affirms that this journey has been worthwhile.
I think that I love the song “Mary, Did You Know?” because it speaks to this reality of humanity, to this reality of the Christian life. Mary knew that she was pregnant. She knew she would have a son. Mary knew that she was mixed up in this God-business that wasn’t going to raise her social status. But a Messiah who has come to redeem the world? How could anyone know a thing like that, a thing beyond the horizons of anyone’s belief?
I feel it safe to assume that Mary had a hard year. I also feel it safe to employ some theological imagination (really, it doesn’t take much), to assume that finding oneself weary and worn–at the height of a miraculous pregnancy, among braying donkeys and a cacophony of other stable animals–makes for a hard birth and delivery. Trials do come. We can’t always know. We can’t ever really control.
But we can hold on. We can hope in a hopeless world. We can expect the unexpected. We can lift our hearts and allow our souls to magnify the Lord. Because the light of the world has come. Does come. Is coming. Is here now. Will come again.
It may feel like suffering greets us at every turn. Like our world falls farther and farther away from our humanity. But one humble spark can set darkness on fire. You don’t have to know. You just have to receive.