Working Things Out

Working Things Out

Romans 8:28

            Life gets complicated.  It begins simple enough.  When we’re babies our needs are basic.  We need to eat.  We need to sleep.  We need to be changed.  We need to be touched and held.  Perhaps the most complicated need is to be loved, but even that seems easily achieved by most little ones.

            As we grow, our needs become more complex.  We still need food, sleep, clothing—and most of all love and affection—but we also need things to occupy our attention:  toys, books, bikes, computers, phones, cars, jobs, houses—you get the point.  Eventually we reach the place where our needs become simple once more.  We need someone to care for us much as we did at the beginning of life. 

            The time when our needs become more and more complex is the longest part of our life.  Complicating matters is the problem most people have of trying to separate needs from wants.  Even as children we say, “I need…” when we mean, “I want…” 

Sorting through the complicating issues of life is what we must do in order to become adults.  Deciding the difference between basic needs, less important needs, and wants is almost never easy.  Choosing the right path from the several which are open to us can leave us frustrated and nervous.  Have we made the right choice?  Should we have chosen B rather than A, or C rather than D?  How will our choices play out?  What will be the consequences?  Where will our chosen path lead us?

Rather than letting the need to choose freeze us in place, we forge ahead, hoping we have done the right thing, made the right decision—trying to look into the future.  When we express our worry or frustration, someone is likely to say, “Welcome to the real world.”

If we think our decisions are problematic, if we believe our choices are difficult, imagine the first century world of Mary and Joseph.  Mary was a young girl—early teens—about to be married to Joseph.  We have no idea how old Joseph was.  One train of belief says he was much older than Mary, but we have no way of knowing.  The Bible is silent about Joseph’s age.  The gospel writers didn’t think it was important.  Young or old, he was caught in a web of circumstances that were difficult to understand and even more difficult to work his way through.

Imagine your fiancé saying to you, “I’m pregnant.  No, I haven’t been with another man.  An angel told me I was going to have a son—God’s Son.  I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”

What would you do?  Joseph decided to do the practical—and for that time the kind thing, and end the betrothal quietly.  Then an angel appeared to him and told him he had been chosen to be the earthly father of this heavenly child.

Imagine yourself in Mary’s shoes.  An angel tells you that you are going to give birth to the Savior of the world.  You—an ordinary young girl, on the verge of womanhood, have been chosen for the highest honor ever bestowed on a woman. 

What would you do?  Mary did the almost unimaginable thing.  She said “Yes!”

Here are these two people, faced with the most unusual pregnancy in the history of the world, trying to adjust to what in that culture could be a damning situation, accepting the assignment, and having faith that all would be well.

And all was well, because all things work together for good to those who love God, who are called to fulfill God’s purpose.