The unexpected.

Luke 1: 26-28

26In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

Losing control, the unexpected, personal loss, fear of God. There are many things will bring fear about. Look at Mary. Here we a have, by all accounts, a normal young lady. She is leading a normal life, she is pledged to be married, she is keeping up with the faith for she is favored by God, I am sure that right up until this moment she had all the same hopes and dreams that many her age have today. She is living her life, just as any girl of her time. In a nutshell, she is happy.

So there she is minding her own business, lost in her own world, minding her own business, and the next thing she knows there is an angel…..no, scratch that, there is the angel…Gabriel himself is before her! One could see where this might cause quite a bit of fear, but going beyond that initial fear, one could only imagine just what would be running through her mind.

Imagine it, here you are life is going pretty and in one second your whole life path is altered. This is what has happened to Mary, and when we look at it that way, wouldn’t we all have some initial fear? Don’t we all jump to battle stations at the first sign that our life course might be altering? We get very comfortable with the idea of just how life will play out for us. Some of us have a very hard time accepting change, we fear it, we fight it, we do everything we can to avoid the change. What makes change so hard is the unexpected; it is the fear of the unknown that keeps us shackled to our same old day in day out lives.

The easiest thing to do when faced with the unexpected is to panic. Yes there is a bump in the road, time to change course, not lose your head. It makes me think of the shows where you see the person get so caught up in the moment; they allow themselves to become so panicked, that they start to stammer, then they start wringing their hands, then it just turns in to full blown mumbling. Incoherent, unintelligible words ran together, as if every fear is rushing out at once. Of course there is the long time friend waiting in the wings, and just as the panic reaches it’s height, the friend reaches in and SMACK right across the face! The panicked person immediately becomes calm and realizes wow, so it is not as bad as I thought it was!

Folks, that right there sums up my point. Look at Mary, yes her life was going as she thought it should. The Lord steps in and changes her plans. When the Lord woks in your life, it is never detrimental. What great news the angel brought that day! Yes, Mary’s life will not finish out the way she thought it might, but look at what the unexpected brought not just her, but the entire world.

We cannot reach the heights that the Lord has planned for us if we panic at the first sign of the unexpected arising. There is only onew person who knows what the true path for our lives is, and that is the Lord………the last time I checked, he is not telling anyone.


Peace,
Rev. Thetford