I wrote the other day about how I felt God had been impressing a message on my heart and mind this December: “You are enough”.
Here’s another message I think he’s trying to get into my (tired) brain this December:
“Give thanks”
It’s cropped up a few places here and there just in this last week. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I was being thankful. If anything I think I was being impatient for the term to end and the opportunity to get some more sleep.
It’s hard to be thankful if you’re not ‘present’ or in the moment, isn’t it?
Reflecting on this at this time of year, I was reminded of the first line of Mary’s song, otherwise known as The Magnificat.
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…
Mary sings this song after she is visited by the angel, Gabriel and told that she will give birth to the Son of God, Jesus. I’m reminded that she had plenty of reasons to not be happy about that news.
In the first place, she was hardly expecting it.
Yet not only is she thankful, there’s also a double whammy in her response.
Yes, Mary rejoices, which I take as an attitude of thankfulness. However, not only that, her soul also ‘magnifies the Lord’.
Mary doesn’t enlarge her problems, her fears or her doubts; all of which would be very easy to do at this time. People would tell her that’s a very ‘reasonable’ thing to do.
But Mary’s not operating by reason. She’s walking by faith.
The Christian life is not lived by reason. It’s lived by faith. Many well-meaning people will tell us that we should do something because ‘it just makes good sense’.
Sometimes we should listen to them and sometimes we shouldn’t.
The Christian life is not easy. We have to strike the balance between faith and reason. We don’t want to go so off-beat that we end up with such a crazy deluded mind that is so muddled up in ‘faith’ that we aren’t sure what’s reality anymore.
Yet neither do we want to be dictated by logic.
The Israelites walking around Jericho for seven days to enter the Promised Land isn’t logical.
Naaman washing himself in the Jordan River seven times to cure his leprosy isn’t logical.
Sending a baby into the world, to grow into a man, to die on a cross to save humanity from their sins isn’t logical.
For the unfamiliar, those three events all occur in the Bible at various points.
The point being that biblical living doesn’t always look logical.
That’s why Mary’s not operating by reason. She’s walking by faith.
So she enlarges God instead.
Now of course, Mary is not capable of making God bigger. And as if God needed any help with that. That’s not what she’s doing. She can’t.
Rather she is turning up the volume.
Mary gives thanks and she aims to make the message she has heard about God known to as many people as she can.
Magnify. Amplify. Turn up the volume.
The song Let’s get loud by J-Lo comes to mind. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone connect J-Lo to Mary’s Magnificat before, but there you go. There’s a first for everything.
A few days ago I started playing the Christmas music in the classroom while my students were doing some storyboarding. Some people refer to this as ‘busy work’ but they are the uninitiated.
Make the storyboarding part of your end of year “Christmas Quiz Bonanza” (end of year revision…cough, cough) with teams competing against each other for points and prizes and you’ve got yourself a meaningful activity.
No one is just filling in time in my classroom, thank-you very much.
However, because it’s me, it was Buble that was playing while they were storyboarding. I’m yet to put together a Christmas playlist on Spotify, and I never thought I’d say it, but perhaps I should be adding in some J-Lo along with Mr. Michael Buble.
Give thanks. And get loud.
I’ll put it on my Christmas to-do list. Mary was thankful for the birth of Christ and so should I be. I know even more about him, than she did.
Yours scrolling through Spotify,
Alison
