How Can This Be?

Mary magnifies the Lord, magnifies the question of Jesus Christ. Takes a life change and magnifies it.

I don’t know about you, but when big things happen in my life–good or bad–I try to manage the event, plan it, cope. Immediately I try to make it smaller.

But if God is with us. If God is not just a lightening bolt miracle, but someone who walks with us in the mundaneness of daily life: understanding the miracle it is sometimes to get through the day, taking Christmas–like pageants–as messy, ordinary and blessed…..then we are able to speak holiness into the blessings, to speak holiness into the tragedies. Then we are confident enough to magnify the questions in our lives. Accepting these moments as holy ones.

Able to sit with those moments when someone you know is suffering, when there is nothing good to say. I think particularly this year of a woman I know who miscarried her baby. This is a moment of “How can this be?”. It sucks until it doesn’t anymore, but the most helpful thing you can do is to sit with the question–no platitudes, no answers, just sitting with the hardness of the question in love. Similar the question can happen in unexpected pregnancies “How Can This Be?” Personally, I don’t care how a new life is started, every time someone gets pregnant its a miracle–one for which we still can’t scientifically pinpoint. And these pregnancies are another moment of holy questioning. “How can this be?”

Just as Mary’s pregnancy was probably more like the unexpected ones, than another kind.And Mary doesn’t try to make it go away, she asks the question “How Can this Be?” and lives with the question growing inside her—bearing and delivering a a question to which she has no answers. In a time where they thought pregnancies could take anywhere from six months to a year, in a place where she couldn’t know whether she would be having the baby alone or not, and eventually–at a time when travel must be had in the final stages of pregnancy–on a Donkey No Less! This a a holy moment of question.   She lives into the holiness of “How Can This Be?”

During Christmas, a lot of questions arise, and family has to be dealt with, expectations have to be met, or passed over, a time we miss whoever is not there more keenly, a time when we are thankful that, it came together.

We had Christmas, again.

and we are able to wonder, speaking holy into the situation

How Can This Be?

And yet, it happens, every year Christmas comes again

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

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