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.