Mary & Joe

I am sitting here trying to work on my sermon for tommorrow. We are doing a series on the characters out of the manger scene. Tommorrow we are talking about Mary and Joseph. Normally the sermon process goes pretty smoothly for me, but I am starting with Phil’s outline he was going to preach, and trying to make it mine. I think I have been listening to way too much Andrew Peterson music, because all I can think about is track 8 on the Christmas Album. It was not a silent night, there was blood on the ground. This poor teenage girl, told she was pregnant, without at least the fond memory of great sex. The pain the comes with childbirth, the lonliness of the situation she was facing. I keep rereading these passages and thinking about Andrew’s song. What would we do in similar circumstances. What would we do, as joseph, being asked to raise the Son of God. Those that knew us well would know that the kid wasn’t really ours. Even the best of friends wouldn’t believe the whole immaculent conception thing. What amazing people Mary and Joe really were. Not because of any extraordinary strengths, but simply the willingness to do what they had to with the time and circumstances they were given.

Isn’t that always the way it is in life, though. People are great because of what they did with the circumstances they were given. Identical circumstances do not yeild the same results, it is based upon how we rise to the circumstance. My mom was left with two small boys. It was not the path she chose. It was probably a path she often wished were different. But she met the challenge and did her best to raise us. She may not be remembered in history the way that Mary was (of course I don’t want to have to try and duplicate some of Mary’s Son’s miracles, sermons, death & ressurection), but she was the hero of the story. She did what needed to be done.

There are lots of thoughts that go through my head in regards to Mary, but bottom line she was a mother who did whatever it took to take care of her son.