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Posts Tagged ‘Angels’

Sometimes … the past comes back to haunt, and once in a while … it comes back to soothe and reassure.

It was a sunny, warm spring day. Hubby and I had packed our modern picnic lunch (also known as fast food, picked up en route to the park), and were heading to a local park with our 20’ish month old daughter.

We drove until we found a park that we had not been to before (and I do not remember ever returning to again). The park was large, with a soccer field and baseball diamond towards the back. Parking was at the front, near the street. Also, towards the front was a small playground area with swings, and a sandbox. And near the playground were just a few picnic tables and benches.

Our daughter was very eager to get to the sandbox … we were very eager to eat our fast food picnic lunch, before the hot and crisp fries became cold and flopsy. And so, she played, and we ate … all of us enjoying the respite that a park provides.

And then, there she was …

A little girl had arrived at the sandbox, seemingly out of nowhere. She was a blond pre-schooler, who seemed older than her years. As quickly as she appeared, she befriended our daughter, and the two of them played, in the sandbox and on the swings, as though they had known each other all of their lives.

As we enjoyed watching their play with each other, we finally realized that this delightful little girl did not seem to have an adult with her. When we asked her who she was there with she pointed to the baseball game, happening towards the back of the park, and said, “they’re over there.” Although we thought it odd for her parents to allow her to be so far from them, at such a young age, we felt we had no alternative, but to believe her.

The two girls sat on the swings, and we responded to their requests to push them. As hubby and I pushed, we marveled at how the two looked so similarly, they could be sisters. Their blond hair swaying in the breeze, and their blue eyes shining with delight, their contagious giggles. Why, they could be … sisters …

And it hit us both … they could be sisters. They looked so much alike, their age difference … why that delightful little girl could be the same age as our first baby, who had never made it to live with us.

It had happened over three years before. At four months into our first pregnancy … the baby, our first baby, died (this wasn’t to be our first such loss, as over the years it was to happen four more times). We never knew the gender of that child, but we had named it, to provide for ourselves some bit of identity. We had decided on the name Alison, because it could be a boy, or a girl’s name. The name is an old one, meaning noble or truth.

The two girls continued to play happily, until it was time for us to leave.

Then we asked the little girl her name … and she smiled at us, and replied, “Alison.”

 

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God knows what He is doing, both now and always.

For instance, He knew what He was doing when Mary was chosen to be the mother of the Christ child … and not me.

Mary was “highly favored” (Luke 1:28), I on the other hand am … extra human in regards to my use of phrase like, “that’s not fair.”

If I were to have walked in the shoes of Mary, and been visited by an angel (that is big enough as it is) who told me that I, a virgin, was to be inseminated by the Holy Spirit and give birth to the Son of God (and not even have the honor of choosing the name of my firstborn) I would not have replied, “I am the Lord’s servant, may your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38).

Then off she goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth … if it were me, my intent would have been to flee the realities that were going on, and to bury my head in the sand, as the great ostriches do to avoid their problems. But no, there is no avoiding reality from her first words, when Elizabeth’s pre-born boy decides to do cartwheels at the sound of her voice.

And the unfair things did not stop there! After Joseph got his angelic visit, and he hoped on board, they had to head travel to be counted in the census that Caesar decided was necessary. So off the pair trod, Mary VERY pregnant, and the two undoubtedly still confused.

Then, upon arrival at their destination of Bethlehem, there is not a room left for them to find refuge, and for their baby to be born.

At this point I would have been looking up at those shiny stars and saying, “really God? Really? This IS YOUR son, could we at least have a place to bring Him into this world?”

God knew what He is doing, then and now. He does not ask any more of us than we can handle, and being the mother to the Christ child would definitely be more than I could handle.

I remember being a young teenager and saying to my God-loving grandmother, that ‘other’ denomination puts too much emphasis on Mary (parroting words I had heard, rather than what my own heart and brain deemed to be true). My grandmother, uncharacteristically firm and pointed in her reply to her only granddaughter said, “and we do not emphasize her value enough! If God chose her to give birth and raise His Son, she must have been a very special young woman.”

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