With Christmas coming up, a lot of my thoughts have been about the “reason for the season.” Today, during Church, my thoughts were turned to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

When I think of the Christmas Story in general, my heart fills with gratitude for Mary and for Joseph. I’m not a mother and I’m not pretending to know what it feels like. I do have an imagination and I like to think that I can sympathize with many regarding their circumstances. Today, I tried to put myself in Mary’s place.

She’s a brand new mother. Her baby boy is only hours old and she knows a little about what’s coming. She knows who her baby is because Gabriel came and told her. She knows his mission is going to be important and necessary. She likely suspects that his life is going to be a bit difficult. For this moment, however, he is completely dependent upon her; and for this moment, he is all hers.

The shepherds are on their way. Angels have been singing. There’s a new star. The whole world knows that she just had a baby and many of them are looking for him.

As he grows up, I imagine that she watches over him and does her best to fulfill the responsibility that has been entrusted to her. Can you imagine for a second being responsible for raising the literal Son of God? I think about the story in the New Testament when he was “lost” and she found him teaching in the temple. If I was her, my thoughts would be along the lines of, “I’m responsible for keeping track of the almost teenager who will eventually grow into the man that has to die for the sins of the world, and he’s lost! I’m in so much trouble.”

I would be running frantically through the city while praying I could find him and repenting like crazy. “How could I lose HIM?!”

And, then, while he hung on the cross, in excruciating pain, his thoughts were directed to her, his mother. He made sure she would be taken care of after he was gone, but she had to watch him die.

I don’t know what it’s like to watch your child die. I only know what it’s like to miscarry one. I don’t know what it’s like to take him down from a cross, when he was put there by people who were supposed to love him. I don’t know what it’s like to touch his wounds and bury him, only to find that his body is gone and suspect that it has been moved by people who hate him and want to humiliate him further.

I don’t think I can even imagine what it must have been like to find out that he’d been resurrected. The joy she must have felt to know that her son, who had suffered for all the sins of the world, would suffer no longer; not at the hands of his friends or those who called themselves his enemies. He had successfully completed what he had come to do.

What a woman.