Guest Author - LeeAnn Bonds
Slow down. I know you have seventeen people coming for Christmas dinner, or you have to pack for the flight home and can’t believe how much it’s going to cost just for your family’s suitcases to make the trip. The snow is deep, the tree is shedding needles into your carpet, the cat keeps stealing the ornaments, the puppy has chewed on the most expensive gifts, the pageant costumes will never be finished in time, you still have to buy something for Uncle Fred, and the credit card bill is truly terrifying. Take a deep breath.
Our twenty-first century pace of life is something short of sane. I do believe that Joseph and Mary, could they peek at the typical frenetic American Christmas season, would have a heart attack on the spot. (Maybe they can peek, but I doubt if they want to!) Let’s lay aside the to-do list for a minute or two, and try to internalize the slower pace at which the original Christmas story happened.
That pace would generally be about three miles per hour. That’s how fast people and horses walk. So even when Mary “went into the hill country with haste” to visit her cousin Elizabeth, she wouldn’t have seemed hurried by our standards. That visit lasted three months. If it takes a long time to get somewhere, I guess you’re not just going to do lunch and head back home.
Several months later Mary went for another walk, from Nazareth to Bethlehem, about 70 or 80 miles. She was very pregnant, and Joseph surely took tender care of her along the way. They may have had a donkey, but one isn’t mentioned in Scripture. It’s hard to imagine a pregnant woman walking or riding a donkey that far, until you consider that Mary walked all the time, to get anywhere. She was likely about fourteen, young and strong, and Joseph probably wasn’t in a hurry. At three miles an hour you can soak up the scenery, have long conversations, scope out places ahead to rest for a bit. We might drive eighty miles to attend a special event, and back home the same day or the next. For Joseph and Mary the journey must have been an adventure in itself.
Those shepherds in the field lived at a slow pace, too. I don’t know how fast sheep can move, but I’m thinking we’re still in the single digits here. Luke does tell us that after their angelic encounter the shepherds “came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger.” But they and we have dramatically different ideas about what constitutes haste, I’m sure.
Mary took time to ponder things. She thought through what Gabriel had told her. She no doubt talked it over with Elizabeth at length—-no fragmentary text messages back and forth. After Jesus was born and the shepherds had visited, she “kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” The Greek word translated ponder means to bring together in one’s mind, or think through and analyze. No flurry of baby showers, photographers, birth announcements and runs to the store for diapers and formula. Plenty of time for meditating on the meaning of what was happening to her, and what that meant for the world.
If you read on in Luke, the unhurried pace continues. When Jesus was forty days old, Joseph and Mary walked the five or six miles to Jerusalem to present the baby at the temple. And some extremely patient people met them there. Simeon had been waiting his whole life to see the Consolation of Israel, the Lord’s Christ. And Anna, who was at least eighty-four years old, spent almost her entire adult life serving in the temple, fasting and praying night and day. No short-term and long-term career goals, no one-year, five-year and ten-year plans. Just live each day at the feet of Yahweh, contemplating His love and magnificence, thanking Him for His blessings and mercies.
These images make me want to breathe deeply and shed several layers of modern life. Tight schedules, multiple commitments and crazy standards of what I have to do and be all the time—these can’t be essential to life. They can’t be central to what we’re meant to experience while here. Surely three miles an hour is a much more sane, peaceful, healthy speed at which to live. Even if I can’t manage it on the outside, where my planner and driving at highway speeds seem to be unavoidable, I will try to make room on the inside for a slower pace. I will meditate on God’s works and grand purposes, the amazing gift of Jesus, of redemption, of adoption into the royal family. I will ponder these things in my heart at Christmas and throughout the coming year.
