Kept and Pondered

Our instinct, when God does something, is to tell somebody. The message is half written before the thing itself has been understood. Lord, we are fluent and we are shallow, and we would rather have a sentence about you than a silence with you in it. Teach us the other thing.

Mary had every reason to talk and Luke says she did not. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. Kept is a storing word, held together, preserved. Pondered means throwing things down side by side to see how they fit: the angel, the shepherds, the manger, none of it yet making a shape. Twelve years later Luke says it again, straight after a sentence he is careful to include. They understood not the saying which he spake unto them, and his mother kept all these sayings in her heart. Keeping is what she did with what she could not explain.

So give us her practice, Lord. Let us hold what you have done without needing to file it. Keep us from turning every mercy into a story we can tell and every wound into a lesson before we have felt it. And answer us this, since it is more your question than ours: what have we been carrying about lately that we have already explained, and never once turned over in front of you?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 201 is Mourning Turned to Dancing (Psalm 30:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two