For this Christmas post, I just wanted to throw out something I have been pondering during this 2024 Advent season: Do you think Mary was like all other pregnant women, in as much as, she had the normal pregnancy symptoms, ailments and complaints? Do you think she dealt with the normal aftermath of delivering a baby – weight to lose, some post-partum emotions, and stretch marks? Having had two births, I can imagine Mary navigating all of this on top of the unfathomable weight of carrying the Son of God!
I received an Advent Devotional from a dear friend this year ( Making Room in Advent), and have been feasting on the refreshingly different focuses of the well-known accounts of the angel pronouncement over Mary and the story of Jesus’ birth as described by the disciple Luke. That is where my curiosity about Mary’s physical effects of pregnancy got stirred.
When the angel visited Mary to tell her she had been chosen to carry God’s Son, I imagine her in a state of shock for at least a while. And once it sunk in,
...she would have had to begin making room for this miraculous pregnancy that had no precedent. Hmm, Making room...It is a powerful, multi-applicable metaphor, don’t you think?
There’s the consideration of making room in her life – her season of life, her plans for her future, even her daily needs would have to change to accommodate being a mother. Then there’s the making room her body would go through to facilitate the growth of the baby over nine months. There’s also the making room in her mind – from accepting the angel’s announcement of God’s plan to use her as His very special vessel, to how people would react to the explanation of her pregnancy as an unwed mother: a miraculous conception?!
And of course, Mary would need to make room in her heart for falling in love with this baby, yet knowing this child would be carrying the mission of saving all of mankind!
No wonder God gives us mothers nine months to adjust to all of this needed change in capacity!
This idea of making room for what is coming is the advent of His plans and promises. It was for Mary, and I believe it is so for us. God is gracious in giving us time to enlarge our thinking, grow our capacity, increase our resilience and strength ahead of the arrival of His next move in our lives.
2024 has been a very challenging year for me and my family. I hold deep gratitude for all the ways I experienced God’s presence, provision and peace within the storms that came. And I am reminded of one of the aftereffects of giving birth is the stretch marks that many of us women bear after delivering our baby(ies). Those marks speak to the necessity of having made room for our role as life-givers – sacrificing ourselves to bring forth new life.
Metaphorically, I can feel my stretch marks, left by the room made for expanding my faith and trust in God through the trials our family experienced this past year, facilitating what new thing(s) God desires to bring forth in this new year for each of us.
Several decades past their making, I’m finding a new fondness for my stretch marks as signs of growth, enlarged capacity, and the reminder that He will help me make room for whatever He is bringing to me and through me.
As I look towards a new year – and with my husband retiring – a new season of life, I desire to respond to His rescues by making room for more of Him in 2025. I desire to love better, to respond quicker to His whispers, and to better reflect the part of His character with which He imbued me even before my mother knew she would be carrying her third of nine children and her first of three daughters. Oh, imagine her stretch marks making room to be a life-giver multiple times over the course of a couple decades!
To ponder:
What have you had to make room for in this past year?
How did you welcome or resist the process of creating the needed space? Was it internal, external or both In nature?
Have you had a glimpse of what you may need and/or want to make room for in the new year? If so, what are you feeling about it? Do you have a safe place to share that?
May you have a joy & peace-filled Christmas, reflecting on His goodness and anticipating His good plan for you in 2025.
Blessed to be journeying alongside you ~
g
May we never stop making room for adventures, our loved ones and for our own personal growth.
Merry, Merry
Cindy
Lovely Geri. And, as is not uncommon, very apt to my current circumstances. Thanks for your insights and questions. Much love.