Advent devotion: Making room

News | December 22, 2015

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

What could Mary have been feeling that first Christmas day so long ago? This short verse from Luke tells us she treasured and pondered after the shepherds had blustered into the stable, bearing news that angels had come to them to tell them the Messiah was born.They were amazed and couldn’t stop talking, but Mary was in quiet contemplation. Later after Jesus was a boy in the temple, we read again that Mary treasured all these things in her heart.

Mary was the first believer in the Messiah. She knew who this baby was going to be because it was explicitly announced to her. Her heart had to have been growing along with her belly as she carried the Son of God.

I ponder the concept of “making room” in our lives for the Messiah to come. Babies have a way of coming when they feel like it, the growth of a child in a woman is unstoppable, and labor, once it starts, is only going to end when the baby is delivered. It makes perfect sense that God would come as a baby. God is going to come when God wants to. The arrival of Christ is unstoppable, and this laboring for the kingdom is only going to end when the kingdom comes.

Like a young mother growing with a child, we can grow, we can make room. Our capacity for seeing God in the world can increase to the point that we are full of God. That young mother in the first century brought us so much. She taught us how to receive the divine. She showed us that humanity can make room.

Amy Diller is a pastor-in-residency at St. Paul. She lives in Davenport.

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