Dot to Dot
“Mary treasured all these words, and pondered them in her heart.”
I really love this phrase in the bible. I really love it because it’s a response to the actions of God that is different to everyone else. Everyone else was amazed at what the shepherds told them, but Mary wasn’t, she quietly pondered. She wasn’t amazed like the others were.
To be amazed is to be shocked or surprised about the reality of something, but not necessarily in a bad way. To be amazed is what we all would like to feel about God sometimes, wouldn’t we. We often want to say, ‘God, show me that you’re there, do something, fix this, change that.’ And in the midst of all those hopes (which aren’t wrong by the way), there’s a wish we often carry to be amazed by God. We want our breath taken away by something he does. We want our hope in God, which we might sometimes despair about whether it’s real or imagined, to pop up and surprise us. A bit like a fish in the face, we want to be roused out of our human stupor, the dis-ease with which we can so easily live our day to day in the world, longing for something better, longing for God to act.
And when God does act, it does sometimes surprise us. And that being amazed feels very good. We are shocked into alertness, because what we see before our eyes, we didn’t fully anticipate. It was hidden away. We had an inkling, but when God acted, the dots between what we thought could be true and what has just happened aren’t actually joined up.
When it comes to our faith, we live in a world that is like a set of unfinished dot to dot pictures. The lines might have been started by us, we may have set off very courageously on the journey of faith, and in our heart we started to draw those lines between the dots as it were, counting carefully, searching out the next digit for where to draw our line. But on the way we might have tired, or became distracted by something in life, and part of the picture is left unfinished. The dots and their numbers carrying on uncounted, as it were. And it’s this gap between the journey we have done in our faith, and the unfinished dots, that leaves us with that sense of being amazed when God does something.
The people hurrying around the stable were good faithful people, who followed the Law, who prayed in the synagogues and kept the feasts. Yet, they were amazed that this teeny child, born right here, onto the ground into hay, should be so central to God’s story- this tiny peasant! And they wouldn’t have believed it if it wasn’t for the very strange testimony of a troupe of brawly, heavy shouldered shepherds tramping into camp with stories of delicate angels announcing this tiny scrap of humanity as God incarnate.
And then we have that wonderful part of the bible that tells us something important was about to happen: we get the word “But” at the beginning of a sentence. This tells us, to listen carefully to what comes next because it’s a learning point for us all. “But, Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”
Mary wasn’t amazed, like the others were. She quietly treasured the words and pondered. You know when you open a child’s dot to dot book, and you find one that isn’t done, no pen has started scribing any wobbly straight line just yet. On the page, there are often pre-printed lines showing something of the detail of the final image. Maybe it’s part of a face, an eye, or something in the background, something harder draw, a hand or something. On the untouched puzzle, those lines look so odd and out of place, don’t they? They entice you to want to do the puzzle in order to see how they might relate to the finished picture. How they fit in with the lines that the child would draw.
Mary’s situation, is like a child who had joined all the dots in the puzzle. She had the strange message from a strange visitor announcing the child. She had that moment with her relative Elizabeth where unborn John the Baptist leapt for joy in the womb, and prompted Elizabeth to run out to greet the arriving Mary. And Mary would have been familiar with the stories and promises of the old prophets, having heard them spoken about by her dad as he came back from the synagogue, or seen them enacted in the actions of feasts and festivals that she attended as a little girl. She took these experiences and joined them together, drawing lines between the dots until a rough angular image of something rather important lay in her mind. Now hearing these bits from the shepherds, it’s as if she’s taken step back and looked upon the image as a whole. All of a sudden, parts of the picture not drawn by her, but present the beginning start to fit into place. She was pondering. What she was pondering was where her line in this life-size dot to dot of faith had begun, where it had travelled through, where it seemed to have arrived, and what God had drawn inbetween from the very beginning.
She was not amazed, she was more likely enthralled. And quiet jewish girl that she was, who knew it wasn’t her place to talk, to jump about concerning the story of God, such as things were back then. She held this truth, this complete picture that the others didn’t get and she knew where she stood in the story. What was amazed believing-disbelief for the others, was quiet confirmation of what was believed by Mary early on, that all that she had experienced so far was true. And in her arms lay the rescue plan of the whole world, made of love.
You may wish to be amazed by God, and there is good reason for looking forward to those moments. But if you want to understand where you stand in the story God, take a leaf out of Mary’s puzzle book. She joined every dot, and got to treasure what was found at the end of it.