I love the Christian calendar – that we can mark our days throughout the year according to the life of our Lord and his Church – and I love that each Christian year begins again with Advent. Waiting and watching for the Christ child to be born in and through us.

Being the mother of two children whom my husband and I adopted at birth has connected me in a profound new way to Mary’s experience of giving birth to a child that was and was not her own. This is the beauty of the Incarnation for us all! I stand in total awe of a God who still chooses to be born in me and in you in so many different ways. Meister Eckart wrote, “We are all called to be mothers of God.”

The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Then, Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Like Mary, what happens to us when “the Holy Spirit comes upon us” and when we, in turn, say “let it be” is simply holy. That which is birthed is and is not our own. And it is Advent that has the power to teach us that birthing God comes not without waiting and watching.

My 5-year- old son is fascinated this year by the nativity set in our home. He couldn’t wait (not such a fan of Advent :)) to place each figure in place in and around the stable, so you can imagine how tough it was to convince him to wait until Christmas morning to place baby Jesus in the manger!

It was through watching and waiting that God wrote Malachi’s and Kamryn’s birth stories for Dave and me, as I carried them in the womb of my heart. It was through watching and waiting that God gave birth to Koinonia of Columbia in Dave and me.

When I began my days at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in 2004, deep within my heart was a longing for inner-city community ministry. Looking back, I see now that this was God’s dream beginning to germinate in me. Much had to happen before God’s dream, Koinonia of Columbia found life in me in 2017. Seminary education, marriage, my first church call, motherhood and even a letting go of the dream.

I see now that this was the gestation. Birthing cannot happen without gestation. It was through much waiting and watching that Edwina Gateley discerned her call to open the Genesis House in Chicago. She writes in her spiritual memoir (In God’s Womb) of these months of solitude: “I began to think of a woman who conceives a seed of new life within her and of how she must undergo a period of gestation and waiting as that new life grows. And I realized that this is what God does with us. Although we cannot see, the invitation is to trust in the darkness and wait for the surfacing of God’s wisdom in our lives by allowing the gestation period to happen… Maybe what we need is simply to realize that God does not hide from us, ever, but that God gestates within us –the grace of God gestates within us – and we must be faithful to the spiritual process of birthing the presence of God into our world.

Like Mary as she awaited the birth of the Christ Child, may we, too, find ourselves singing as the grace of God gestates within us this Advent season! “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…” And when the waiting is over and the Christ child is born in each of us in so many different ways, may we, like Mary, “treasure up all of these things and ponder them in our hearts.”

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