Taking Time to Ponder

Christmas Day is over, and perhaps you’re reading this in the midst of the aftermath of your Christmas celebrations. You might be sitting in a room cluttered up with strewn bits of forgotten wrapping paper and presents waiting to be found a place for, or maybe there is a sink full of dishes you were just too tired or busy to wash. Perhaps there are family members around you, or perhaps you are experiencing the peculiar quiet that descends on a house when guests have gone home. I suppose the day after Christmas is a little bit different for each person.

The day after that very first Christmas, however, would have been rather ordinary. Mary had given birth to her first child, and although she knew He was the Son of God, the promised Savior, He was nevertheless still a newborn.

That Christmas would have been the beginning of motherhood and the unfolding of all its responsibilities. The shepherds had come to see the Child, but had gone away again, and Mary and Joseph were left to settle into the everyday duties of caring for an infant.

Scripture doesn’t record just when it was that the little family moved from the stable to the house mentioned at the time of the Wise Men’s visit. It doesn’t tell us about the ordinary details of life: it focuses rather on the remarkable occurrences revolving around the coming of the Savior.

While it is easy to complain about the lack of detail and wonder what life was like for Mary and Joseph as they raised a perfect Child, I am reminded of a line from Dylan Thomas’ poem, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. He speaks of “the never-to-be-forgotten day at the end of the unremembered year.” Just as the visits to Mary and Joseph from angels, shepherds, and wise men were significant events to be remembered and shared, Christmas for us is often one of those remarkable events that form the fabric of our remembered past, and which we share with the next generation.

But amidst the peculiar mixture of remarkable and mundane that surrounded Christ’s birth and childhood, Mary did a very wise thing. Luke 2:9 tells us, “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The shepherds had come and told their tale of the angels and what they had been told about Jesus, and then they left, telling everyone they met about the arrival of the Messiah.

Mary’s response was to treasure up what the shepherds had told her and ponder. She didn’t take for granted what God had said and done, but took time to think about it, to turn those things over in her mind and to solidify them in her memory.

While your Christmas this year was likely not spent in a stable giving birth, or with visits from shepherds you had never met, God was still at work in your heart and life.

We would be wise to take a cue from Mary and treasure up in our hearts the events and truths of God’s working in our lives this Christmas and this year, taking time to ponder each one.