Legacy Ladies Note: If you know Katie, you know she’s a little obsessed with childbirth. And, she knows a lot about it. Katie worked as a midwifery assistant for two summers in the Netherlands, where most women do not use pain medication during labor (ouch), just like Mary when she gave birth to Jesus. Enjoy Katie’s beautiful perspective about what believers can learn from Jesus’ birth. – Nikki

 

By Katie Logsdon

We always say that the point of Christmas is to celebrate “the birth of Jesus,” but what does that actually mean?

One part of Luke 2:7, “then she gave birth,” holds a significance overwhelmingly greater than the length of that statement. A little over 100 years ago, most women gave birth in the home, so even women who weren’t mothers were very familiar with the birth process. Today, because most women in developed countries give birth in the hospital, the magnitude of what it meant for Mary to birth Jesus may be lost to us. Imagine the scene of a woman giving birth, just as Mary did 2,000 years ago:

A mother experiences hours of trial, using all of her focus to work through the birth. She may moan, scream, or breathe deeply in simultaneous escalation with the contractions of her uterus doing the hard labor of delivering life. At the height of her labor, the mother clings to her husband for comfort and asks how close, how close, how close as she feels life inch through her birth canal and the peak of the head becomes visible to a room in full expectation.

Then, a child is born.

The mother reaches to grasp her child’s tiny body and cuddles the beloved to her breast with tears of joy and a full, beaming smile. She may be physically torn and broken, in need of stitches, but none of it changes the elation of her child’s arrival.

In light of the miracle of Jesus’s birth, how can we respond?

When Mary reached down to embrace Jesus in full human form (with bloody, amniotic fluid skin and all), the memories of the hours she had just spent in labor melted away. She still had her scars, but nonetheless she turned her attention to welcoming the Savior.

What scars are stopping you from welcoming the Savior this Christmas?

For me, greed has made me wake up in the morning for Bible time wanting to hide under the covers from God rather than go before Him, confess my sin, and face conviction. I say this to myself as much as I say this to you: don’t wait. Your Father came as a human, in the most humanly way possible, and faced suffering for you (Hebrews 2:9).

Let the magnitude of His coming propel you past any scars and acknowledge His power over your life. We are saved through grace, not works, but any symbol of denying self for the glory of God sets us up for reigniting our devotion to Him past this season.

Just like Mary and mothers everywhere wait for their baby’s arrival through the beautiful anguish of childbirth, we too can live through our current circumstances acknowledging God’s sovereignty and expecting Jesus’ return.