Of Mothers’ Hearts and Birth Announcements
The birth of a baby is good news! Parents want to tell other people and the people they tell want to tell others, too.
The way people share the news about a baby’s birth has changed in the last 35 years. When each of our children was born, we used the phone in our hospital room to call our parents right away. An announcement was placed in our church bulletin. We mailed out birth announcements to our relatives and friends.
When Jesus was born, our heavenly Father shared the good news about the birth of His one and only Son. The first thing He did was send angels to shepherds in a field near Bethlehem.
When we brought each of our babies home from the hospital, my parents came to spend time with us. Ray’s mother had already died by then, but his dad and step-mother came, too. Our neighbors and people from church dropped by also.
When the angels went back to heaven, the shepherds started talking to each other. They had exciting news and they needed to talk about what to do right then. Naturally, the first thing the shepherds wanted to do was to find the baby without delay! They said to one another:
“Let us go straight to Bethlehem then,
and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.”
Luke 2:15
When people came to see our babies, they found them in our arms or in the bassinet (the one I had slept in myself) or lying in some other comfortable place. Of course, the shepherds found our Lord in a manger.
The shepherds went back to their sheep, but they glorified God and praised Him for everything they had heard and seen, which was exactly as the angels had said it would be.
When the shepherds had seen Jesus, they told other people about the baby and about what the angels had said. Everyone who heard their story wondered about what the shepherds had told them. I think God was kind to send the angels to a group of shepherds instead of just one. It is always lonely to have news and have no one to share it. Just imagine how wonderful it was for those shepherds. For the rest of their lives, they had a bond with each other and a shared experience like no one else had ever known.
Mary did what mothers do.
But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart.
Luke 2:19
We mothers take things deeply into our hearts. When we rejoice over our children, we bubble over. When we grieve about our children, our grief is almost indescribable.
As Mary watched her son from the time He lay in a manger until He died on the cross and then rose and ascended back to His Father, she watched with a precious mother’s heart. I am glad God made me a woman with a woman’s heart.