Why Not Me?

Mary, even at a young and tender age, seems to know that life itself is a gift from God, and that God is good to us even amid personal struggles.

There’s a little three-line poem, written by a pastor from New York. It’s called, simply, “Virgin”:

It seems everyone wants at least 3-5 years’ experience.
Except God, that is.
He looks for the one willing to try something new.¹

Never were words more truly spoken, as applied to Mary, that little slip of a girl from Nazareth. Of all the people God could have chosen to bear the Messiah, God chose her.

What do we know about Mary? Not much. She was a peasant girl of peasant stock, just one of millions of human beings over the centuries who lived and died without a birth certificate, Social Security number or digital footprint on the internet.

Were it not for this one remarkable fact about her life — that she gave birth to a baby named Jesus — we would not even know her name. Her life would be a cipher, her long days of fetching water and baking bread lost in obscurity, her earthly remains buried in the ground, and her bones long since absorbed...