Story by Jennifer Kish
The suffering of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
I often think about what it must have been like to be Mary. What would it be like to hold the Savior in your arms? What would it feel like to look into the eyes of the child who would ultimately rescue the world from death? What did his little voice sound like? Did he like to be rocked to sleep? Oh, to have held that baby!
The older I get, the more I realize that Mary’s calling to be the mother of Jesus was a calling to a life of suffering.
When the angel showed up in her home her life, the one she had planned, was turned upside down.
She had to tell Joseph she was pregnant, he assumed she had been unfaithful. Pain.
She was an unwed pregnant woman which bore great shame. Pain.
She carried and delivered a son whose life was threatened from birth. Pain.
She listened as people taunted and mocked her son. Pain.
She watched as soldiers tortured and beat him until he was unrecognizable. Pain.
She stood at the foot of the cross and stared up at the broken, lifeless body of her son. Pain.
Her son became her Savior in the same way that he became ours, but the pain she felt was different. It was the suffering of a mother.
So often we fall into the lie that Jesus wants us to be happy. We get caught up in the idea that if he truly loved us we wouldn’t go through difficult stuff. We begin to believe that if Jesus was really interested, he would spare us the pain.
If we look at what his own mother suffered we would see that it’s NOT in his love that he SPARES us from pain. It’s IN his love that he PURSUES us through our pain.
Our goal should not be happiness, it should be holiness. And when we seek to let the pains of this world draw us closer to the cross, we begin to look a little more like Jesus. And we lay down our goal of happiness and from the foot of the cross we find joy.
Joy even in the midst of suffering so that we, like Mary, would be found faithful.
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