This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go!

At church today, we talked about the Christmas story in both my small group and during the sermon. Sitting there, I was struck by the number of things that happened that wouldn’t have happened had I been in charge.

I mean, I’m sure Mary never dreamed that her marriage would start with an unexpected pregnancy. I’m sure to be a woman the generations would call blessed, she wasn’t expecting that pregnancy to come before she and Joseph were actually considered married. In their wildest dreams, I don’t think Joseph and Mary thought that their impending marriage would be tarnished by gossip and dirty looks, possibly even ostracized from family and friends. More than that, I don’t think the couple planned on Mary giving birth in a stable, which despite the pretty pictures we like to paint, likely wasn’t glowingly warm or sparkling with cleanliness. It was dirty. It probably smelled. It wasn’t home. And Joseph was the only one there to help her give birth, a moment that I suspect in the family-oriented Jewish culture would have involved the women in Mary’s family gathering around her to help her through the labor. As Andrew Peterson so eloquently put it, Mary gave birth with no mother’s had to hold.

It probably wasn’t what she dreamed about when the angel announced she would give birth to the Messiah. What girl dreams of giving birth like that? What girl dreams of this strange relationship with the guy you’re planning to marry who has some reason to think you’ve been unfaithful? Who wants to stand in front of Simeon eight days after the birth of your first child and be told that a sword will pierce your very soul?

I don’t know if Mary and Joseph knew that this would be the road they’d have to walk when God invited them into His plan. I like to think that they would have responded the same even if they did know it. But I also wonder if they were anything like me and ever thought, just to themselves, “This isn’t the way it was supposed to go!”

Because that sure does make it easier for me, because I say those words to myself all the time. When what I had in mind doesn’t quite turn out that way. When I find out something that I did and thought nothing about hurt someone. When my grandma breaks her arm in the nursing home because she got so upset she fell out of her wheelchair. When Missouri loses to Kansas. 🙂

So this year, I’m celebrating the unexpected—the good and the bad—as opportunities.