Jesus asked his disciples - What are you looking for? What do you want?
Good Friday Reflection: Mary kept many things in her heart.
Photo By: FLickr/Beatrice Murch
Mary kept many things in her heart.
God's favor, Joseph, angel visit, immaculate conception, leaving home, mother to the most High and many, stellar birth witnessed by shepherds/kings, anxiety of losing Jesus for 3 days (when he was 12 years of age), watching Jesus' wisdom grow, miracles multiply, believers banded and disciples chosen. She harbored it all in her heart as she obeyed the working will of God.
Her heart knew that Jesus was the Son of God. She didn't know that He would be tortured, put to death on a Cross, and then rise from the dead.
I can't help but to reflect on the suffering as a mother that Mary must have endured. When she watched her Son carry a heavy wooden Cross up the hill of Golgotha, did she have the deepest desire to pick up the back of the wooden beam, wipe His sweaty face and clean His wounds with spit, shout words of defense to all the slander, search for his scattered followers to help overturn His sentence, throw stones at those that drove in each nail or shake a fist to the heavens to ask why a Father would do this to His one and only Son?
Even as the Cross bears down all its weight on a heart of a Mother, she didn't give in to its temptations.
Her faith would find her at His footrest of the Cross, under a Friday's dark sky with the only thing that she could provide - her sacred presence. While Jesus hung under the heavens, stretching His sinless hands out for salvation... I wondered if they prayed. Did she reassure Him of His righteousness? And speak of her love, a Mother's unyielding love - in the hopes to distract from the painful reality and from his fleeting feeling of abandonment.
She knew that Jesus' yes to God was as absolute as her yes to the Angel Gabriel.
Mary kept many things in her heart.
In the brokenness of it, she waited for God to do the impossible.
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About the Author
I am a published writer who's work has been included in various community magazines, non-profit newsletters and in poetry events. I've also been a blogger for over ten years - www.sonshineblog.com and been part of SCBWI (Society of Children book writers & illustrators). I chair a non-profit foundation that supports the bereaved community who have lost a child. (www.sharingmiddletn.org). I also teach religious education at my Catholic Church - where I can be seen on any given Sunday making antennas out of foil to explain the invisible broadcast of the Holy Spirit to my preschool classroom.
