Advent Calendar – 9 December
Nativity Stories: Mary
If you’d asked me before what Nazareth was like, I’d have said it was boring. Nothing ever happened there. We all thought that, the girls who played when our mothers didn’t make us help with the bread or feed the lambs who’d been abandoned. Our lives would be like our mothers and grandmothers – work and babies and finding the money for the rent and the taxes, hard enough in a good year when the rains didn’t fail in winter.
But now everything was happening. The visitor, and my body changing, and my father telling me he’d had a talk with Joseph and he was going to stand by me though it had been a close run thing, and tongues wagging every day. Mum could see I was stressed: why didn’t I go and spend time with Elizabeth? We could help each other expecting our babies, and didn’t the visitor mention her anyway?
So I packed a bag with clothes and combs and food for the journey and off I went. I knew the right path to make a start up into the hills, and people would surely give me directions along the way. Just before dark, I found her house, and she said a pile of the kindest things to me. Even the baby inside her jumped up and down when I arrived.
A week became a month, then two, then three. I loved my time there: they made me feel at home, even funny old Zechariah who couldn’t speak a single word. The more time I spent in those hills, the more I thought about what was happening to me. Not just the sickness and the feeling of life inside me, but God choosing me, Mary, just an ordinary girl.
If I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think a lot about the Lord before – I just went along with what you had to do, and enjoyed all the songs and dressing up at festival times. But now, I found myself praising the Lord because he’d come to me, and looked me in the face though I’m nobody really. I suppose I’ll be remembered for ever now, and people will think I’m blessed, God giving me this baby from himself. But then he’s always loved his people, those who trust him. The more I got thinking, the more I realised the Lord is on our side, and always has been, against the people who only care for themselves, who lie and cheat and lord it over everyone else. He brings them down eventually. He’s always cared for the nobodies, making sure we’ve survived through hard times, hungry times. He didn’t need to look after the rich: they didn’t need charity. I began to think – I’m only me, but the whole country will get his help through his love for me. It’s weird: I feel part of the promise he made all those years ago to Abraham (I remember Mum telling me the story of Abraham and old Sarah who laughed when she heard she would have a baby), that Abraham would be a father to a nation, like me, a mother to a king, a king forever.
Rosemary Namuli Karuga, Mary