The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”
Luke 1:35 (NIV)
She Asked How
Her mother-in-law had an answer for every part of it. Let him hold the sleeve of your coat during the slow song, she said, and keep the crackers in your left pocket so you’re not digging around for them, and if he cries in the second one it’s the bells that do it. She’d put three children through that same choir and every rehearsal in front of it, and every single thing she said turned out to be right.
Mary asked a how question too. How will this be, she said to the angel, since she was a virgin. The Holy Spirit will come on you, he told her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Then he went on about Elizabeth, who had been called unable to conceive and was six months along in her old age, and he finished this way: for no word from God will ever fail.
He named who would be doing it and what the child would be called, and he left the mechanics alone. She could go and see Elizabeth for herself. It’s a long way from a woman leaning over to tell her which song the crying starts in.
Nobody was standing next to Mary with a trick about coat sleeves. Nothing of this kind had been done before, and experience was not for sale at any price that year.
Most how questions get answered by a person who has been through the same thing, and those answers are worth a great deal. A few don’t. A diagnosis the family has never seen before, or a trouble your friends have no answer for, so they bring food instead.
She was given the name of the one who’d be doing it. A name is thinner than a procedure and considerably harder to argue with, and she had it in her hands when the angel finished speaking.
She told him she was the Lord’s servant. The angel left her after that, and she got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country.
A Prayer to Remember
God, half of what I bring you starts with how. How will this get paid, how will this get better, how much longer. You mostly answer by telling me who you are, and I’d be lying if I said that settles me every time. Answer that way anyway, and keep me from going somewhere else for a better-sounding one.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
