![]() I’ve been treasuring this experience often in the last few days, thanking God again and again for his mercy. It was a precious thing to celebrate Advent and Christmas by experiencing confession, forgiveness, and relational healing. I had the chance in the last couple of weeks to experience relational reconciliation with someone who means a great deal to me. Or you might remember some other way God’s grace touched you. You might reflect on how it felt to be together with beloved family and friends. In addition to treasuring the biblical account of the birth of Jesus and its meaning, we can also treasure our current experiences of Christmas. There are certain Christmas carols I cannot sing without getting completely choked up, even though I’ve sung them for six decades. In this season of my life, I find that God’s truth put to music has a special way of getting into my heart. We can be open to hearing God speak to us in a personal way through the Advent/Christmas story in Scripture. We can listen well to the biblical story as it is read in church or sung in concerts (such as in Handel’s Messiah). This is mainly a matter of paying attention. We can treasure Christmas by pondering the events and their meaning in our hearts, just like Mary did. (Let me say, I’m doing this even though my 64-year-old brain doesn’t memorize as easily as did my ten-year-old brain.) I’ve been doing this, in part, as a way of treasuring the reality of Christmas. This year, during Advent and Christmas, I have been memorizing a couple of wonderful Advent/Christmas passages: Isaiah 9:2-7 (“for a child has been born for us”) and Luke 1:46-44 (Mary’s Magnificat, “my soul magnifies the Lord”). I memorized the Christmas story in Luke 2 when I was ten years old and can still mostly recite Luke 2:1-16 from memory in the King James Version (yes, rather like Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas). How can we treasure the reality of Christmas? Well, for one thing, we could always do some literal treasuring, that is, memorizing. The memories you treasure are ones you bring up from time to time, reliving past experiences and enjoying the bittersweet nostalgia they produce in you. You also think about them, pondering what happened and how you felt. If you treasure events in your life, you don’t just store them away somewhere safe. ![]() The English verb “treasure” covers both the “memorizing” and the “pondering” senses. ![]() Rather, she was also examining each photo, reflecting on both what happened and what it means. She also “pondered them in her heart.” The Greek verb translated as “pondered” means “consider, ponder, or give careful thought to.” So Mary wasn’t just storing things away as in a mental photo album. The Greek verb translated as “treasured” means to “protect, defend, treasure.” It has the sense of “storing up information in one’s mind for careful consideration.” Mary quite intentionally sought to remember everything that happened during her momentous visit to Bethlehem.īut she didn’t just memorize things. Mary treasured all these things in her heart, including the words spoken by the angels and the shepherds. The Greek word translated here as “words” also means “things,” and is probably better understood in this way (following the NIV, ESV, and CEB). ![]() Whereas they went out and told everything they knew about what had happened, Mary “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Luke sets up a bit of a contrast between what the shepherds did after their visit to the holy family and what Mary did. Today we look closely at Mary’s response to all that had happened: treasuring. So far in this series on Responding to the Wonder of Christmas we’ve focused on the varying responses of the shepherds: fear, resolution, action, and witness. It’s also part of the series Following Jesus Today. Today’s devotion is part of the series Responding to the Wonder of Christmas. Though the celebration of Christmas may be over, the wonderful reality of God coming to dwell among us remains. But in the last few days of official Christian Christmastide, may we take time to “treasure in our hearts” the reality of Christmas, much as Mary did two millennia ago. I know that for many people it feels like Christmas is over. ![]()
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