I saw a billboard yesterday that said that “20% of Americans go hungry”. Having just returned from Africa, I thought, “Hunger is relative.”
Christmas time is full of extra commitments, parties, shopping, decorating, baking, and church events. It’s a wonderful time of year yet when it is time to crawl between the cool, clean sheets of my comfortable bed; it is a relief, for I am tired.
Yet, tired is also a relative term. I lay in my bed this morning and thought of Mary. Being nine months pregnant, she was physically tired. She sat for days on a donkey, jostling back and forth while her back ached and her eyes threatened to close. Did she ever beg Joseph to stop long enough for her to take a short nap? After a long day of travel, she cooked supper over an open fire, washed the dishes and packed them away again for another day’s travel.
Her hormones and emotions led to another sort of tiredness as she wondered where they would stay and who would help her deliver her baby as she was so far from her mother and around strangers. Did she want to cry tears from the exhaustion of it all? Did she cry because she missed her mother or because her new husband did not live up to her expectations?
At the end of the day, feet swollen, back aching and her lungs fighting to breath as she lay without a stack of pillows, she stretched out on the hard cold ground for another night’s sleep. Did she pray she would get a good night’s sleep so she would not slow down the caravan? Did she want to pull the cover over her head in the morning and sleep a couple hours longer?
Yet, she had made a decision nine months earlier to obey God and to trust. She had said, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said,” She would not complain but would carry on, trusting God for the energy to get through each day AND finding joy in it. She would wait on the Lord, knowing that His plan was perfect and that His child would come and God would be with her.
As my tasks build up and I feel tired this Christmas season, I will remember Mary and will thinking on the fact that ‘tired’ is relative.