Mary,
Did you ever feel overwhelmed?
Did the weight of it all press on your chest
in the middle of the night
when no one else was awake but you and God?
Did you ever ask Him, quietly,
Are you sure I’m enough for this?
Did you kiss his small feet,
that had yet to touch the ground,
Not knowing they would one day press into waves and steady them?
Did your lips linger there, unaware that all creation would be waiting for those steps?
Did you hold his hands,
guiding them through ordinary days,
Not knowing those same hands would heal the sick, would lift the broken, would bless and be
broken themselves?
Were there moments you longed to be ordinary?
To have a son whose life stayed small,
whose dangers were limited to skinned knees and not prophecy?
I worry about the small things…
am I patient enough, gentle enough,
doing this right?
And you were entrusted with the Savior of the world and still had to learn motherhood
one day at a time.
When you felt overwhelmed, when you felt inadequate,
did you remind yourself
that even the Savior of the world
first needed a mother
to simply hold him?
This Christmas, I see you differently.
Not only as the one who said yes,
but as the mother who held that yes
through every ordinary day.
I’m so grateful for these days,
for the weight of a child on my chest every night, for the small holiness of being needed.
And yet, I cannot imagine the weight you carried, to love a son so completely while knowing the
world would ask everything of Him.
By Isabel Krauss Enloe