"no mother's hand to hold..."
Sitting in my chair, the cusp of advent upon me. Sitting empty. Full all around, full cup of tea, full chair of blankets, full house of heat, full boxes of gifts. Yet empty soul: coming, kneeling before God, approaching the Christmas season, but really, actually, living advent. Living the waiting. Urging for hope.
In my musing, my waiting, my empty, I paused and listened, guitar chords melancholy, but voice pitched through clear and storytelling, stringing notes and words. The messy of birth, the cold of desert sky, the crying of the night, the tears upon her face.
Then this line sung out:
"no mother's hand to hold..."
I sat back. Stopped. Sunk the words in. Let them seep in like love and mercy and known during this season of living empty and sad, with no mother's hand to hold. And all that is absent because of that -no mother's hand to hold.
And something in the line hugged my heart and slid love over me with Mary. A different knowing, a different recognition, a different awe, lying cold in that cave, because of Christ.
I paused on that moment, that miracle. But that painful space in history when a worn, weary, wandering woman trembled giving birth, alone. And I felt it, with her.
Then God sat me there, for minutes, for hours, praying and pausing on that moment of Mary, but that moment of Him, too. He wanted me to stop, to pause, to see. To see more than Mary, more than the moment, more of Him.
God held her, with no mother's hand to hold.
God had a plan, with a city not her own.
God had her hope, with a future so unknown.
She lay in her weeping, in her agony, in her giving of birth. But God had a plan, a hope. God would use this woman, with no mother's hand to hold.
So perhaps for me, too, God holds a plan, a hope. And perhaps too he will enfold me, with no mother's hand to hold.
@ Behold The Lamb, "Labor of Love" ~ Andrew Peterson and Jill Phillips
