For my Advent devotions, I am reading Walking the Road to Bethlehem: Your Journey to Christmas, by Adam Hamilton, a pastor with the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. I found this little book in a Christian bookstore in our city and thought this would be a good read for the season.

Opening in Week one is understanding of the town of Nazareth and its people. Also its proximity to another bigger centre an hour of walking for citizens of Nazareth, but a ten-minute drive if we were driving the distance today. Nazareth was called a place of the “have nots.” It was a town for the poor or what we might call “the other side of the tracks.”

Hamilton ponders the place in civilization for a young girl like Mary and God’s choice to bear his son, Jesus.  A king might be born of the wealthy with many advantages, but this child “born to be king” would not have those pluses.

Having grown up in a Christian family, I’ve heard the story so many times, it is perhaps ingrained in my memory, but each writer presenting Mary brings their own suggestions of how it might have been for Mary. Those who have  travelled to the Holy Land or studied the scriptures at length will be steeped in the history of the time and the social conventions that surrounded this young girl in Nazareth, who would have been quite young at the time.

A book I read years ago, Two from Galilee, by Marjorie Holmes, also paints a picture of the young woman who would be the mother of our Lord.

More another day…

Mary, from History`s Women, the Unsung Heroes, an artist`s portrait