Mary Did you Know?
It is the eve of Christmas Eve. Aubrey and I just got home from seeing the Nutcracker and having dinner at a fancy restaurant, just for fun! It has been hard to have fun lately. It’s the first Christmas without our son. It’s the first season that we are contemplating the birth of Christ, the suffering he was destined to endure, and the deliverance that we have because he chose to give the Father His “yes,” after enduring our own loss. I’m sitting here, thinking about sacrifice, thinking about brokenness, and thinking how it just doesn’t seem like our little family gets much downtime from facing adversity. My conclusion is that the point of life on earth is not to feel good, that’s not the goal. It can’t be. It can’t be because I have made the right choices, to have a feel-good life. I’ve followed the rules. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that because I have played by the rules I think God should give me a good life. On that level I believe quite the contrary. However, I have done the hard right things that people who are pursuing a stabile, healthy, “good,” life ought to do. According to the monopoly of human standards, I should be winning. In a lot of ways I have a very good life, of this I am aware, but that doesn’t negate the extreme trauma I have faced
Inescapably, despite my greatest efforts, my life has had some deeply intense encounters. I was raised by a father who was physically absent, and a mother who was physically present, but 2000% emotionally absent. I suffered severe psychological and emotional abuse as child, and was very devastatingly neglected at times. Somehow, however dark my days were back then, the over-reigning memory I have of my childhood was being alone in my room, tears streaming down my face, desperate for love, and encountering the sweet presence of Jesus. He always came. He always showed up and wrapped Himself around me. If you haven’t experienced it, I will not be able to convey to you the amount of love I felt from Him as a child. He parented my heart, something my own parents were not capable of.
As I grew, I began to allow my heart to dare to love. When I was a teenager, I was so desperate to belong, so desperate to show someone the gold I knew was inside of me. Desperation like that at that age, begs for rejection. No one likes desperate people. Teenage peers are rarely wise enough to look past the insecurity, manifesting in neediness, and see the gold. This set me up for a lot of friendship failures. It lead to the darkest season of rejection I had ever experienced. It solidified the deepest fear instilled in my by my upbringing; “you aren’t worthy of anyone’s time, you aren’t worth knowing.”
I came out of my teenage years, and crawled towards adulthood in a complete mess. My motivation in being likable and successful still had a full tank, but my heart was like a trillion shattered fragments that had experienced a tsunami just after an earthquake. I had a hole in my heart, I walked around wounded for so long with my big thick bandages, masking the pain. I put on a happy face and reached towards optimism with all of my might. This was my way of coping with rejection. This was my way of managing my pain. Some say that sounds pretty healthy, but you know what: it wasn’t! Because deep down inside I was still that little girl, wanting approval, wanting someone to want to know who she was– wanting to be valued.
In my early twenties my husband and I began dating. We hit it hard when we first got together; immediately challenging each other towards person growth. That’s kind of my style. If you want to be my friend, and you don’t want to experience personal growth, one two things will happen. 1. You won’t like me for very long. 2. I will decide that spending time with you is unsastisfying because our conversations are circular and they aren’t causing growth in either of us. I supposed both may possibly happen. That’s just how I am, I am terrible at staying on the surface. I’m ok with it too. Fortunately, my husband is fiercely loyal, and also dedicated to his own consistent growth, so we went metal to metal and got through some major insecurities in both of our hearts before marriage. I am so incredibly thankful for his perseverance and commitment to seeing my heart come to life. He has always made me feel like I am enough. He has never made me feel less than. He captures and destroys every seed of fear and inadequacy in me before it has a chance to touch the soil. I love him, and the fact that we were drawn to each other with the heart-state we were both in upon meeting is nothing short of miraculous.
He and I have had a lot of trauma since we’ve been married, seeing multiple loved ones pass, and walking with others through life threatening conditions. We have know the joy of being given life, and we have know the pain of life being taken away. This has happened over and over again in our almost 8 year history, more times than I care to mention, and the most reason life that left us was our son’s. We have continued since he’s passed to get more difficult news, some of which is related to the details of his death; some completely separate.
I don’t know why all of this has happened to us exactly, but I know that God has used all of the pain to undo me. He has not only undone, “me,” but has undone the patterns of thinking I have had through generations of dysfunctional relationships. I asked Him as a little girl to break everything off of me that could negatively impact my husband and my children. I asked him to refine me. I remember crying out as a young girl, in my bedroom, saying, “I don’t care what it takes, make me like You, no matter the cost.” This wasn’t a prayer instigated by the church you guys, this was an honest, deep, burning within me, that came up all by itself as a response to His love. I know that it is in His mercy that He has allowed me to experience such a deep level of pain. I know that the more we break, the more we become Whole. I know that the good-life, without hardship or tragedy, is an illusion. The human experience is marked by pain. Pain is the only thing every person on the planet has in common. We have all experienced personal pain.
Tonight I listened to “Mary Did You Know?” sung by The Skaggs Family. I started to picture myself as Mary, trying to allow myself to feel as she might have felt after discovering all that was to come from her precious baby boy. I began to weep, feeling so honored to be able to empathize with Mary. I’ve always loved that song, but today I love it even more. I love that song in a way I would never be able to, had I not lost my own son. I began to think about how much purpose her child carried; how much promise. She knew she was carrying the son of God, but did she know that one day she’d have to watch him die a seemingly wrongful death? Did she know?
Mary’s son brought so much healing, so much purpose, but suffered immensely. I can’t imagine how much Mary’s heart suffered, seeing her son’s suffering. I can’t imagine the pain, and the sacrifice she felt when she saw Him hurting and mistreated and thought… “God, is this really what I signed up for?” She was brave, and pain produced such a victory in her life. I keep thinking of the line in the song, “…this child that you delivered, will soon deliver you. Mary did you know?”
She birthed him, she allowed her heart to mother the Christ child. What a sacrifice as a mother. People talk about it like an honor, wonder what she did so right to become the chosen virgin to carry the son of God. You know what I think? I think I would have been more like… “Really, I stay a virgin and my reward is birthing a son who is going to be misunderstood and mocked his whole life and then killed because of the truth about who he is?” When you put it that way, knowing the fierce love a mother has for their children; it sounds more like a punishment than an honor. When a child hurts, their mother hurts. When a child is treated unjustly, it leaves a mother completely undone. The pain of knowing your child died because of humanities brokenness is a weight that I would wish on no one. This is the responsibility that the mother of Jesus was given. This was her blessing.
Pain is the point; I’m convinced. The point of life is to allow suffering to break you open and so you can become truly Whole. This has to be the point. If the two most Whole people that ever existed had to suffer more severely than anyone else, then suffering must be a big part of the formula that leads to becoming Whole. Mary delivered Jesus, and after delivery she continued to endure suffering. Jesus entered into labor for humanity, and we were the ones delivered through His suffering. Suffering must somehow be a gift, the ones who suffer are the blessed ones. His ways are so unlike our ways, and His thoughts are really higher than our thoughts.
I am going to wrap this up because I am not sure if any of you are still with me. Also, my eyes are getting heavy and that is a sure tell sign that I will not make sense if I type much more. Merry Christmas to you all, may you experience the peace that surpasses understanding, no matter your circumstance this season.