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Elder William Dixon
Friday, July 3, 2020
Humility in the Midst of Crises
“The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born[d] will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”’ Luke 1: 30–38
There is so much good news in this story that it is easy to overlook the fact that the angel’s message put Mary in a difficult position that few of us would want to face. It threatened her reputation and her relationship with her fiancé, family, friends and community. When viewed in that light, her response, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” is simply remarkable. It reveals an understanding of who God was and a willingness to humbly accept whatever God had in store for her. Her humility allowed her to say “let it be” despite all of the unknowns (even when what she did know was troubling). And the news didn’t get any better when Jesus was presented in the Temple days after He was born. There the prophet Simeon told Mary that the unknowns would ultimately rend her heart like a sword. Mary, nevertheless, pondered all these things and obeyed.
We are confronting economic, political, financial, existential, social and all manner of other uncertainties and upheaval. We don’t know how long these crises will last or what they will mean for us, our families, friends, communities, or country. What we can know and can work to know even better in these days, however, is who the God is who calls us to live lives that please Him. We should meditate on the simple truths that every hair on our heads is numbered, that He hunts for us when we are lost and rejoices when we are found, that He asks us to endure hardship patiently sometimes, and that He became flesh and fully experienced what enduring hardship patiently means. As we integrate these truths into our lives, we, like Mary, can then work on humbly trusting Him and accepting whatever He has in store for us even when, looking ahead, there are only unknowns.
In 1939, as Britain entered WWII facing the horrors that they had seen play out on the continent and all manner of uncertainties about their fate as a nation, King George VI reassured his countrymen with these words from a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
Mary seems to have understood that knowing who God was and walking with Him was better than knowing what lay ahead and knowing how to navigate life’s unknowns. As the songwriter Ira Stanphil puts it, “Many things about tomorrow I don’t seem to understand. But I know who holds tomorrow. And I know who holds my hand.”
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