God Sees Our Humanness

And He knows how to use it for good.

It is December, advent season, Christmas time.

It is a time of year when we often hear, talk about and/or reread the Christmas story.

I grew up in church, so I’ve heard the story since I was little, but I’ve had fun diving deeper into it in the last decade or so; really digging into the details, the purposeful hand that God had on the entire story, from the dawn of creation to the birth of Jesus.

While the bones of the story might be the same every year, there is always something new to learn. And this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary.

In the Christmas story, we meet Mary as she learns she is pregnant by immaculate conception, we read about how an angel comes to her and to Joseph, and how they travel to Bethlehem and give birth in a manger.

We know Mary, we love Mary, we are inspired by Mary’s faith, but too often I think we forget that Mary was a human just like us. And since we hear her story over and over—every Christmas we’re putting her on that donkey, and every Easter we’re putting her at the foot of the cross—we forget that she would have lived a human life with human emotions and struggles.

Like any woman, any mother, any human, she would have had hard days, she would have occasionally felt lost or confused or heavy with the burdens of the world. She would have asked God why and when and how and where, just like we do.

With the hindsight the Bible gives us, it’s easy to believe that these characters we know and love somehow had it easy, because the puzzle pieces of their lives fit together so perfectly to carry out God’s plan.

In the present day, we crave the same kind of clarity. But it’s important to remember that we’ve had thousands of years to study those puzzle pieces. And that the people in the Bible likely craved the same clarity we do.

Which is why I think it’s so important for us to read and reread stories like Mary’s.

Because God sees and knows our humanness. And the stories we read about in the Bible help us see that the struggles of our humanness have been the same since the very beginning, and that God has been with us from the very beginning.

God’s plans have all of us in mind. And all the pieces will fit together perfectly, whether we see them or not.

So when you think of the Christmas story this year, remember that Mary and Joseph were just like you and me: humans. And though their story is one of profound faith and perseverance—their story is part of the greatest story ever told—that doesn’t mean there wasn’t fear and doubt. It doesn’t mean they knew what was ahead or that God gave them a road map he didn’t give us. It just means that they followed their faith forward—they took it day by day, trusting that God was with them every step.