I've got the grandbaby. Our first little package of guaranteed happiness - a new, beautiful generation for our family. Her timing could not have been more perfect. I honestly believe she was sent to us in advance of losing David- like a little angel, come to to make us smile despite our great pain. She's surely kept me in my right mind.

I remember when Stephen told me I was going to be a grandmother. I had been faithful to react the way I had rehearsed (with boys who have a penchant for both affection and adventure, I thought I ought to.) Thank God. I reacted with Joy.

So, I'm home from church where I sat among friends considering how Mary dealt with the Angel's bomb shell: she, a mere teen, would be giving birth to the Son of the Most High. It's the third week of Advent, after all. A week for joy.

I wonder if Mary knew she would have to watch her Son die. Most of me hopes the angel spared Mary the forecast of his awful death, but part of me also thinks she had to know. How could she not, with carrying Jesus? Gracious! I imagine she had super powers while she was pregnant. Luke's story goes that she knew the future- that she would be "called blessed", even by our generation.

I think and pray many times a day for David's "recipients", as I've come to call them in my mind. Four physical lives have been saved and people will go on and the lives of their families will be forever affected by David's death. Wow. In church today a friend let me know that David's story had changed her in a way that has made her faith stronger. Others have said likewise, that my experience has had a profound effect on their spiritual lives. It's amazing to me, this whole thing.

I am humbled and shamed by my selfishness, my narrow-mindedness in my prayers for David in the hospital. I honestly could not imagine why God would want to take him. I could not imagine how it could be a good thing. I just knew God would heal him and send him back to us, different maybe, but back. I believed that God wanted what I wanted. God's ways are not our ways. My prayers of petition should be shorter. And fewer.

So it's Mary who's in my mind and heart most this Christmas. I wonder if she comforted herself at the Cross with the knowedge that because Jesus died others would live. I hope so. It comforts me to know that a few lives have been changed for the good through David's death, perhaps with eternal consequences. Is it blasphemy for me to identify with Mary?

God is Great
God is Love
xxoo