Last Updated on March 21, 2018
If your belly is lookinglike a bowl full of jelly, welcome to the “Pregnant at Christmas” club, where most of us are shaped a little like a cheeseball right about now.
I actually really enjoy this privilege (pregnancy, not the cheeseball look); I feel like it gives me a special “in” to identify with the Christmas story, and it’s certainly humbling. Being with child and meditating on Mary’s journey of faith brings a new perspective to morning sickness, the so-exhausted-I-feel-like-I’ve-been-run-over-by-a-truck exhaustion of the first trimester, then the “Is she pregnant or just overindulging in the Christmas cookies?” phase, then the grueling hours of labor. I keep remembering that Mary went all-natural with her very first labor and likely only a male carpenter (one who hadn’t seen her naked) to help her—her mom was out of town, and she may not have even had a midwife. She dealt with the questions a pregnant mother considers: How will I raise him? What will he be like? Whom will he look like? What do I do with this baby?
But Mary, “highly favored” by God, suffered things I never had to deal with: explaining to her parents that God had made her pregnant, dealing with the disgrace (after a life of faithfulness!) from a community that could have stoned her for her condition–and not only while she was pregnant, but raising an innocent son (the “illegitimate” child) in that reality. She also had a long ride on a donkey when she was about nine months pregnant, which sounds a little rough on the ol’ body, don’t you think?
I’m grateful for the special graces God gave her for this journey that would affect the rest of her life. I wonder how many times she revisited the appearance of Gabriel or her own words, “I am the Lord’s servant; may it be to me as you have said” when she was sick, or given one of “those looks” from a neighbor, or looking on as her son experienced capital punishment at age 33.
I’m also simply amazed at the form our Savior took on. For awhile he existed as only a few miraculous living cells, then was floating around inside a woman without arms or legs, then being entertained by an umbilical cord or thumb-sucking. It’s still amazing that the God of the universe came into our world through labor and delivery of a shamed woman’s body. He then submitted himself to a life beginning with dirty diapers, nursing, spitting up, and potty training.
Carrying a child in this season brings me a new degree of humility and gratitude! May you be filled with the expectation of His next, and far more glorious, appearance.
Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him … Philippians 2:8-9
Janel Breitenstein graduated summa cum laude from John Brown University and began her career with NavPress, where she worked on The Message Bible. After having four children she resumed her professional career (around her momlife) by serving as a writer for FamilyLife. Personal loans. In January of 2012 Janel and her husband, John, packed up their family of six and moved to Uganda to serve with Engineering Ministries International (eMi), an organization that focuses on poverty relief and development, providing structural design and construction management for Christian organizations in the third world. Join us as we all learn first hand, through Janel’s posts, what it’s like to go from suburban America, to answer God’s call in Africa!