Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.
-- Rosamund and Benjamin Zander
Ever noticed...that we all have some degree of sexual insecurity?
Maybe that’s part of why we seem so obsessed with it culturally.
I am a Christian because of women who said yes.
-- Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith
Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) reflects on how Mary’s yes was pivotal to the Incarnation.
I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment, yes to the considerable risk of pregnancy and childbirth… yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.
By becoming human, God encourages us to honor the vulnerability of our own lives:
It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb…. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap….
I cannot entirely make sense of the storyline: God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”…
To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us. And through Mary’s example, God invites us to take the risk of love—even though it undoubtedly opens us up to the possibility of getting hurt, being scared, and feeling disappointed.
-- Rachel Held Evans
Can’t say I disagree — they sure went after Biden on this topic.
I'm wondering...about innocence.
Among other things, how does this time of year play into it? For the most part, we seem to want to let our guard down a little and believe in something more…innocent, for a moment.
Innocence is often referenced as something lost. Perhaps this is why we watch for opportunities to reclaim it somehow. Why certain situations, places, or times of year seem to enable us to suspend the things that have taken it from us.
In these ways, we often opt for things that make us feel like a child again. The cynicism of growing older resubmits itself to the possibility that, even for a moment, things could be uncomplicated, simple, pure, good, and hopeful again.
We all had a kind of innocence and most love a chance to feel it again.
