And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2: 18-19

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother pondered all these things in her heart. Luke 2:29-51

Over the span of my lifetime, perhaps my heart’s greatest cry has been that I might be delivered from worry. There are few things I would claim to be really good at, but worry is one of them. Actually, sometime during my 30s, I probably reached professional status. If there were an Olympic event for worrying, I’d have gold-medaled consecutively. I’d be a sought after talk-show guest, regaling television audiences with spectacular tales of worry and woe, dishing out advice for the worrisome, and looking appropriately worried–creased brow, tight lips, ragged cuticles, in a word: haggard. I’m also very good at looking haggard. Somehow, in a tragic turn of God’s natural order, I’d come to regard worry as good and necessary work. It was the work of good mothers and teachers, the work of martyrs and saints. Or so I thought.

If anyone had cause to worry, it might have been Mary. To learn that you would be carrying the Son of God, that your betrothed would soon discover that you were pregnant before marriage (and not with his baby), that as a 12 year-old, your son would remain in the temple after you’d left for home and that he would claim that he was simply taking his place in his Father’s house? Just one of these things would be enough to bury you under a mountain of worry from which you may never dig yourself out! But Mary pondered these things in her heart. Even as I reread these scriptures, I’m acutely aware that while Mary pondered, I simply worried. While Mary rested in God’s promise and assurance, I worked myself into frenzies of apprehension and fear. While Mary waited on God, I forged ahead of him, trying to pave my own desperate way.

Novelist Sue Monk Kidd writes:

I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means to endure. Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.     

Like Sue Monk Kidd, the real problem with waiting–even waiting on God–is being passive. For much of my life, I’d come to regard worry as active. If you were worrying, you were exacting some kind of control over circumstances which were chaotic and uncertain. If you were worrying, you were demonstrating your willingness to work hard at life and love. If you were worrying, you were doing something.

Herein lies the real difference between Mary and me: she pondered things in her heart, and I worry about things in my head. Mary didn’t ask to be delivered from worry, and even though she clearly had normal mom-things to worry about, I’m guessing that she slept well. In contrast, I often lay awake, struggling to sleep as the winds of worry buffet gray matter against the rocky shores of my brain.

Christian speaker and writer, Henri Nouwen writes:

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.

Mary was a patient person in the truest sense of the word. She was willing to live each day to the full, believing that something hidden would manifest itself to her. She was able to ponder things without expecting immediate answers or solutions. Instead, she lovingly carried the things she couldn’t yet understand, storing them as treasures in her heart. Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we’re waiting for, writes pastor and writer Charles Stanley. Mary was willing to wait because she valued and understood for whom she was waiting. She had faith that God would reveal all things to her in his time.

For many of us, waiting is a dash, an unwelcome punctuation mark in the sentence of our lives. It delays the conclusions we seek and the outcomes we desire. It interrupts the answers to the questions that plague us. It intrudes upon the rhythm of life we’ve come to expect. If we have to put our lives on pause, we like commas better. They offer short respites after which we are able to get on with things. But dashes? They try us. They test our very souls.

Christian author John Ortberg writes:

Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

Ortberg rejects the notion that waiting is merely something we have to do until we get what we want or that it is a period during which we have to endure until we get answers we want. Waiting, he claims, is a necessary part of God’s plan for us. After the angel appeared to Mary to tell her that she would be the mother of God’s son, without hesitation, she said, Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word. [Luke 1:38] From this moment on, she would wait upon God, accepting whatever was done to her.

In the end, Mary understood–like Elizabeth and Zechari’ah–that though she may not be delivered from those things which wound and scar us, she would always be able to take comfort and refuge in the Deliverer. She could ponder all these things in her heart because she understood that God held her heart in his hands.

This is the good news of the Advent season. The Deliverer is here, and he holds your heart in his hands.

And Zechari’ah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak to you, and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” Luke 1:18-20

Zechari’ah, a man who had walked blamelessly with God for his entire life, stood in the presence of the angel Gabriel and could not believe God’s good news. How could this be? How could such a faithful man doubt after years of committing his life to God? How could he refuse to believe even as he heard the promise of God’s blessing?

It would be all too easy to scorn Zechari’ah. Foolish man who looked a holy gift horse in the mouth! Weak of faith, ignorant of all he had formerly professed! What a loser! He is the stuff that parables are made of—the protagonist who blows it, a most pitiable type of character who professes to believe but ultimately collapses under the weight of his own doubt. Oh, Zechari’ah, we love to loathe the doubters! We delight in scapegoating them as we busily bury our own unbelief in the deepest pockets of our souls.

In the Tragic Sense of Life, Spanish author and philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, writes:

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Perhaps Zechari’ah, like many of us, believed more in the idea of God as he followed the Commandments and precepts of God. But he seemed to falter when the ideal became real. Gabriel was no idea but a living, breathing deliverer, a holy UPS man with a special delivery: a long awaited child.

As much as I would like to scoff at Zechari’ah’s unbelief, holding fast to the conviction that certainly I would respond differently, I am painfully aware of my own doubt. Just as I am sadly aware of the fact that I am often one who believes she believes in God. And yet even as I claim this sad awareness, I take solace in Unamuno’s claim that passion of heart, anguish of mind, uncertainty, doubt, and even despair are necessary and paradoxical elements of faith.

I think poet Rainer Maria Rilke would agree, for he contends that your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. Maybe the first step in training your doubt is claiming it. In Mark 9, Jesus comes to the aid of the disciples who have tried, but failed, to remove a demon from a young boy. Jesus addresses the boy’s father, saying, If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes. The father cries out, Lord I believe; help my unbelief! Here the father claims both his belief and unbelief, his desire to believe and his fear that he cannot. In response to his genuine admission, Jesus removes his son’s demon.

And after you’ve claimed your doubt? Then what? Pastor and counselor Eric Venable writes: Doubt is a catalyst for owning one’s faith and allowing the faith story to continue. Perhaps another step in training your doubt is including it as an authentic element of your faith, one that allows your faith story to continue. As we wrestle with unbelief, we may move through seasons of tumult and seasons of peace. These are the seasons of our faith stories. We winter in periods of doubt and summer in times of assurance. Just as surely as the seasons cycle, so, too, do the seasons of our faith stories.

Within months, Zechari’ah and Elizabeth’s long winter of doubt and suffering gave way to a summer of belief and joy. With the birth of their son, John, God’s promise was fulfilled in his time, and their faith stories continued.

Like many, I have longed to be delivered from my unbelief. Often in desperation, I have cried out, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief! But I am learning to look at unbelief differently, to begin a training regimen in which I find ways to consciously use it–rather than let it use me. In his novel Underdog, Markus Zusak writes:

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It’s because you’re seeing it backwards.

I hope that Zechari’ah could finally see his doubt from the other side, that he could look back upon a lifetime during which God had not forsaken him. For there is good news for all who occasionally (or frequently!) suffer from weak faith and unbelief. In his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller writes that it is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. God delivers even those whose imperfect faith is often riddled with doubt.

As I think about the seasons of my own faith story, I can see my doubt from the other side of winter. In the smallest heralds of spring, I can see that my Deliverer is near–winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Deliverer

I will raise my cup of deliverance and invoke the Lord’s name.
Psalm 116:13

Outside, the world grays.
Bone-weary and lean,
trees reach with brittle fingers that break the sky.
The stalks of Black-eyed Susans bear heads like spiny sea urchins
and the white souls of pampas grass sing hoary carols
along every road.

Everything waits for deliverance from the bondage
of these days:
finches whose once-gold wings now tarnish the frozen air,
capless acorns which litter the timber floor,
clouds which collapse in thin, pale ribbons
upon the horizon.

Everything waits to be delivered—
for a shot of chlorophyll to the heart,
a familiar chorus of crocus
and thickets laced with light.

Yet even in our exile,
the lichens prostrate themselves
on the backs of sleeping stones.
And wakened with the green hope of fungi,
the stones cry out:
Behold, our Deliverer!

After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she hid herself, saying, “Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.” Luke 1:24-25

To be delivered from reproach among men–what deliverance this would be! To throw off your cloak of shame, to step out from the shadows, and to walk confidently into the company of men and women whose easy camaraderie you had looked upon longingly from your own dark rooms. Who among us wouldn’t put this type of deliverance on their Christmas list this year (and every year to come)?

To feel reproach for the infertility which has defined you for years, however, is a singularly female condition. This is a largely silent form of reproach, a form consigned to whispers and quick looks passed among fertile women. It is reproach that defies our better sense, for we intellectually understand that biology fails in a broken world, and we socially acknowledge that a woman’s worth is not measured by how productive her womb is–or not. And yet, nonetheless, this reproach persists.

Reproach grows from the seeds of difference, and difference often blossoms into discrimination. Polish psychologist and WWII prisoner of war Henri Tajfel pioneered a series experiments called the minimal group paradigm. Tajfel wanted to know just what conditions would prompt people to discriminate against others in an outgroup. What he discovered was that he could create distinctions between groups that were truly minimal–even trivial–but they still provoked one group to discriminate against those in the perceived outgroup. Regardless of the degree of distinction, it seems that humans generally reproach those they regard as other.

There would have been nothing to visibly mark Elizabeth as infertile. She would have easily moved within the throng of women in the market place. Still over the years, Elizabeth would have been relegated to the outgroup of the barren, and she would have felt the sting of reproach even long after her child-bearing years. As she looked longingly at women who took their fertility for granted, she may have felt as though infertility was a life-sentence from which she would silently and privately suffer.

I am painfully and personally aware of this outgroup, as are many other women who have faithfully charted their ovulation cycles, desperately resorted to the latest medications and medical procedures, hopefully turned over their life savings to doctors, herbalists or whoever offered the possibility of pregnancy, and silently braved their days among fertile female colleagues, friends, and family. Although the stigma of infertility was clearly more public and reproachable in Elizabeth’s day, it lives today. At the very least, it lives though self-reproach, which is perhaps the most brutal form of all.

We live in a world with so many outgroups. Is it any wonder that this world is rife with reproach? Even when we believe we are far too complex to be defined by any group or label, it is inevitable that our personal, political, social, or spiritual views will land us squarely in some outgroup. And it is inevitable, then, that we will become reproachable.

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ character Belle, the beautiful young woman whom Ebenezer Scrooge was once engaged, says to him:

“You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.” 

We often fear the world too much. And when our hopes meld into a single desperate hope to escape the world’s sordid reproach, we yearn for deliverance. For reproach, like black mold, sends spores behind the walls of the tender selves we send into the world each day. And there it grows. And grows. We breathe it in, and it weakens what immunity we have against all that threatens to undo us. We yearn for a toxic clean-up crew to deliver us.

The author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien writes: Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. Could Tolkien be right? Could sorrow and failure be necessary for the joy of deliverance in the real world as well as in fairy tales? As an older woman (some estimate at least in her 60s), Elizabeth bore a child. After a lifetime of reproach, after decades of sorrow and shame, she was joyfully delivered.

Like Elizabeth, most of us long for the joy of deliverance. French writer Alexandre Dumas understood that our longing should center less on deliverance, however, and much more on the deliverer. He writes:

God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.

Although Elizabeth and her husband Zechari’ah had spent their lives walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, it is God–not their upright living–who delivers them from childlessness and the world’s reproach. He sends the angel Gabriel to Zechari’ah:

“Do not be afraid, Zechari’ah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth” [Luke 1: 13-14]

As I reread Elizabeth and Zechari’ah’s story, I cringe at my attempts to deliver myself from sorrow and shame. I recoil at the countless times I have exhausted all other means of deliverance before I turned to God. I am going to edit my Christmas list this year. I will begin by removing Deliverance and replacing it with The Deliverer. In this season of Advent, truly the joy of deliverance begins with the right deliverer.