“I am the Lord's servant,” Mary answered.  “May it be to me as you have said.”  Luke 1:38

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.  - Luke 2:19

What a huge amount of life happened in the roughly ten months between when Mary spoke those first words to the angel Gabriel, and when Luke describes her surrounded by shepherds and whatever other sundry visitors arrived to see her newborn son.  What a massive disparity between her words of obedience, and what that obedience actually looked like!

It must have been surreal, there with Gabriel talking to her.  To be in the presence of the messenger of God is almost impossible to imagine.  How much did Mary really understand about what he was saying?  How much of her response is based on a reflex reaction, understanding automatically that you don't argue with angels?  How much was based on an actual comprehension of his words and what they would mean for her life?  His words were rewriting everything she expected about her life.  Recasting expectations, events, people, places.  How could she have possibly known?  Could she have possibly said no?  

I'm sorry, but I have other plans.  Thanks so much for thinking of me, though. Perhaps another virgin might have a less cluttered schedule...   

We – like Mary – know the right words to say.  We say that we wish to be faithful and obedient, to follow the Holy Spirit's guidance.  But this is often a reflex.  We know this is the appropriate thing to say and do.  It's what we were taught in Sunday School, probably in a few otherwise forgettable sermons.  In Bible Studies when we found time to go to them.  But the actual process of setting aside our own inclinations or desires?  That's a lot more complicated.  To truly embrace having our ideas, our plans, our goals, our desires rewritten or eliminated in order to follow the Spirit's leading?  That's a hard row to hoe. 

Mary said yes to God and His mysterious working in her life.  But she couldn't have known.  She couldn't have known, in the fading glow of Gabriel's departure, what it would look like and feel like, this obedience she had pledged.  She couldn't have imagined the look on Joseph's face when she had to tell him.  When she had to say the words I'm pregnant, knowing in his mind and in the shocked and pained look on his face and in his eyes, that his immediate thoughts were It isn't mine.  

We sugar coat the story into two dimensional ginger-bread characters that we pose in the right positions of obedience.  We assume that obedience must entail all of the proper changes of heart and mind to make it reasonable and enjoyable, forgetting how often in our lives obedience felt horribly alien and unwanted - the last thing that we wanted to do, even as we acknowledged in our hearts that it was the right thing to do,.  

I don't think the angelic dream that Joseph had probably changed his hurt, his confusion, his anger.  It wasn't just Mary's life that was being rewritten, it was his own as well.  Together they would have to bear the scorn and derision of their friends and family.  The knowing smirks and snide words.  Together they would have to live with the stigma of having failed God's commandments, while all the while living out those Commandments.  

How little Mary's experience must have looked and felt like whatever she might have imagined in the fading glow of Gabriel's departure.  Whatever excitement she may have felt at being chosen as the instrument of God had to have dissipated under the relentless onslaught of reality.  Of doubt.  Of fear.  Of suffering.

Because faithfulness in a fallen world with fallen people is an invitation to suffering.  An invitation to being overruled, overworked, overtaxed, overextended by our world.  It's an invitation to being unappreciated, undesired, uncared for by those around us.  If we are uncertain of how obedience and faithfulness in a fallen world looks, we have no need to look further than 30 years or so down the road in the life of this beautiful Christmas baby.  Obedience and faithfulness can lead to suffering.  To abuse.  To mistreatment.  To death.  Nothing in Scripture excludes suffering as a possibility or even likelihood of obedience and faithfulness.  We are foolish to expect otherwise, and close to Peter's evil in demanding it, prompting Jesus to chastise him with “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Matthew 16:23).  We are not called to faithfulness instead of suffering. We are called to faithfulness through suffering.  Despite suffering.