It’s hard to imagine how frightening it must have been for teenage Mary to see an angel and hear him speaking to her. The Bible says that “Gabriel appeared to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!’
Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. ‘Don’t be afraid, Mary,’ the angel told her, ‘for you have found favor with God!’” (Luke 1:28-30). We can’t help but wonder what the angel looked like and what he sounded like. As frightening as it must have been to see and hear an angel speaking to her, it must have been even more frightening for Mary to process what the angel was telling her—that she was going to become pregnant, even though she had never been intimate with a man.
This would be a scandal in her village. Everyone would whisper about her. She would be shunned and perhaps sent away by her fiancé, Joseph, because he would think she had been unfaithful to him. And yet, even though she probably had a million questions and concerns, Mary responded to the angel by welcoming whatever God wanted to do. She said, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true” (Luke 1:38). In a sense she said to God, “I’m yours. You can do anything you want with me,” even though she must have known that this situation would be very hard for her, for Joseph, and for her whole family.
It’s easy to label what we consider “good things” in our lives as gifts from God and to welcome them with gratitude. But when difficult things happen, we don’t look at them as part of God’s good plan for us. Mary’s example shows us we can also welcome those things we would not necessarily label “good,” confident that God’s gifts sometimes come in perplexing and even painful packages.
When we belong to God, we know he will use whatever he allows into our lives for good. Somehow, in God’s hands, these things also become gifts of his grace toward us. It takes faith—faith to rest in who God is and his love for us; faith to be confident that he is doing something good in and through our difficult circumstances—to see the hard things in our lives as gifts of God’s grace.
Nancy Guthrie is the author of numerous books and is a member of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, in Franklin, Tennessee.
This content originally appeared in All is Bright: A Devotional Journey to Color Your Way to Christmas. Copyright © 2010, 2016 by Nancy Gutherie. All rights reserved. Devotional text taken from Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room, published in 2010 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., under ISBN 978-1-4143-6441-4.
Read the previous articles in our Blessed Among Women series here:
Blessed Among Women: A New Series Celebrating the Witness of Mary