It has been a year.

I mean this quite literally; it has been a year (and then some) since I last had anything to say on this blog.

(Scratch that. I’ve had plenty to say. It’s just that most of it has been far too raw to be shared with the world.)

But also? It has been a year.

As you read that line, put a special emphasis on the last word. Imagine me when Jonathan comes home from work, my hair and my eyes both a little wild. Imagine the kitchen a mess and the laundry in haphazard heaps and dinner burned on the stove. Imagine me meeting him at the door of his car before the engine is even off, the sound of shrieking children in the background.

“Can I have just five minutes to myself? It has been a day.”

(Not that such things ever happen around here.)

That’s the kind of picture in my head when I say, with feeling, that it has been a year.

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I wonder if Mary ever thought to herself, as she neared the end of her pregnancy, “It has been a year.”

I’m hesitant to type those words, to draw even a tenuous connection between my story and hers. I am not like the mother of my Lord – I lack her strength and courage, her faith, her quick and ready acceptance of the path God laid out for her – and my situation in no way resembles hers. I cannot relate to being an unwed teen in an honor/shame culture. I don’t know what it would be like to be chosen to bear the light of the world. Such things are so far outside my experience that to make any kind of comparison is almost laughable.

And yet, so much of human experience and emotion are universal. Joy and sorrow, fear and hope, love, shame, trepidation. A longing for renewal, for things to be set right as we wrestle with a world gone so far wrong.

So I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to try to empathize with that young woman, to imagine what it might have been like for her, to think that at the end of a tumultuous year, one that included an unexpected pregnancy, an almost broken betrothal, a long distance journey, and all of the emotions and turmoil such things would have evoked, she might have looked into the sweet face of her sleeping newborn and whispered to him, “Oh, Son, It has been a year.”

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Several months ago, a wise friend reminded me of the Old Testament story of Joseph.

“Joseph was given dreams,” she said “Powerful, amazing, wonderful dreams. But his dreams didn’t include being thrown into a pit or being sold into slavery. They didn’t include being separated from his family, from everything he knew. They didn’t include prison.” She paused, then held my gaze as she continued. “Just because things are hard doesn’t mean that beautiful dream you had was false. God might still be working to make it happen – might, in fact, be using this very trial to make it happen.”

Later, in response to a different challenge, another wise friend encouraged me with this text:

“I know everything is overwhelming and unfair right now, and it’s tempting to think you made a bad decision. But don’t let the short-term hard things overwhelm the long-term goodness.”

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Mary was given a magnificent vision, a wonderful dream, a beautiful promise. Her Son was going to be the long-awaited messiah, come to reign on the throne of David forever.

But Gabriel’s pronouncement didn’t include the ostracization of her community. It didn’t include trekking across the country in the last month of her pregnancy or giving birth far from home. It didn’t include becoming a refugee, fleeing from one land of oppression to another because of the cruel whims of a maniacal despot.

It didn’t include watching her Son die.

There may have been inklings along the way – in the prophecy of an old man at the temple when her precious newborn was tiny and new, in the ancient writings which told of the suffering messiah. She was wise and intelligent, courageous and bold, and she’d have known the ramifications of being unwed and pregnant in her society, even as she sang her praise to God for what He had done for her.

But during those long nine months, and again in Egypt, and again still as she wept at the foot of the cross, when everything felt overwhelming and unfair, I wonder if it was hard for her to hold onto the beautiful vision she was given, if it was tempting to let the short-term hard – oh so very hard – things outweigh the long-term promise, the long-term goodness.

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I’ve spent a lot of time this year, and especially this Advent season, thinking about what it looks like to be faithful even when it feels like the very path in front of you is designed to send you sprawling. When the world is dark around us, when everything seems overwhelming and unfair, it can be so hard to cling to hope.

Luke doesn’t tell us whether Mary wrestled with God as she faithfully obeyed, and so I don’t really know whether Mary had her moments of doubt. I don’t know if there were days when it felt near impossible to hold onto the powerful promise she had been given, if she ever lost sight of the long-term goodness in the midst of the short-term hard things.

But I’d like to think that maybe she did. Maybe she was a little bit like me, yearning and waiting and questioning and hoping. She was human, after all.

I wonder if what Luke does tell us – that she pondered the shepherds’ visit and their wild tales of the host of heaven filling the sky, that she treasured in her heart the way the boy Jesus learned and grew and submitted and questioned – was his way of telling us how she managed when those valleys came, when the hard parts threatened to eclipse the hope of what was to come.

And so, as I come to another Christmas season at the end of a year that has been, well, a year, I’m imagining that Mary was a little bit like me . . . and then I’m turning it around and trying to be a little bit like her, pondering and treasuring and looking forward to the hope that is to come.

Merry Christmas.