The Girl Who Said Yes

Luke 1:26-38

Far from anywhere important, in a little town no one wrote songs about, there lived a young girl named Mary.

She had no crown, no palace, no servants to braid her hair. She was poor, and she was ordinary, and she was so young the grown-ups still called her little.

If you wanted someone to carry the King of all the world, where would you look? In a great city, maybe. Behind tall castle gates. Among the people everyone bows to.

But God was not looking there. God was looking at Mary, in her small house, in her little town at the edge of everything. The God who made every star had been watching her all along, the way you watch someone you love.

One day the room filled with light, and an angel was standing there. It was Gabriel, the same angel who had stood beside the altar and promised old Zechariah a son. Now he had come with even bigger news.

"Hello, Mary," he said. "God is so glad about you. He is with you."

Mary's heart pounded. She did not feel important enough for an angel. She did not feel important enough for anything at all.

"Don't be afraid," said Gabriel. And then he told her the most enormous secret in all of heaven.

"You are going to have a baby. A boy. He will be the King who never stops being King, the Son of God himself. And you will name him Jesus."

Mary looked down at her own small hands. Me? she thought. A poor girl from nowhere? "But how?" she whispered. "How can this be?"

"God will do it," Gabriel said gently. "Nothing is too hard for him. Nothing at all."

This is the way of God. He passes by the loud and the mighty. He bends down low, past the palaces, past the crowns, and he finds the smallest one, the youngest one, the one who feels too unimportant to matter. And he says: you. I have chosen you.

That is what God's kingdom is like. So the King of everything would not be born in a golden bed. He would come to this poor girl, in a poor town, with the animals and the hay.

Mary took a breath. She did not understand it all. But she trusted the One who was asking.

"I am God's servant," she said. "Let it happen, just as you said."

Then the angel was gone, and the light went with him, and Mary stood alone in her ordinary room, holding the biggest secret in the world.

The girl no one noticed had said yes. And soon her feet would be flying down the road to Elizabeth's house, because news this big is too wonderful to hold alone.