In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!”
Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!”
Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”
The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month. For the word of God will never fail.”
Mary responded, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.” And then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26–38 NLT)
One of C. S. Lewis’s lesser-known series of books is a space trilogy, fantasy books masquerading as sci-fi. In the third book, That Hideous Strength, one of the characters, Jane, begins to feel something otherworldly approaching the room she is in. “Something intolerably big [. . .] was pressing on her, was approaching, was almost in the room. [. . .] The whole room was a tiny place, a mouse’s hole, and it seemed to her to be tilted aslant—as though the insupportable mass and splendour of this formless hugeness, in approaching, had knocked it askew.”
This “something” in the story is an eldil, a creature akin to an angel within Lewis’s trilogy. Jane, having never been in the presence of an eldil before, feels her entire world knocked askew. Even though everything remains as it was – nothing actually shrinks or grows like Alice in her Wonderland – Jane’s perception of the room has become smaller and knocked off its axis. It’s as if the very weight of space has been bent around the eldil, like the space around a black hole, and the immensity of their presence makes everything and everyone seem the size of a mouse by comparison. Even her perception of the world in which the room exists has shifted; no longer is the world level and calm. In this moment, she is catching a small glimpse of what it means to live on a spinning orb flying through the heavens, resting on its axis at a slant.
I imagine this was something like what Mary felt that day the angel Gabriel visited her. As she was going about her day, a creature unlike any she’d ever seen suddenly arrived in the same space she was occupying, the weight of the presence of this being seemingly bending space and time, allowing Mary to feel her own smallness in the shadow of the agelessness of the messenger in front of her.
Then the angel tells her the reason for his visit.
Learning of the important role she would play in the history of her people – in the story of all creation – some might have felt themselves grow larger; others might have broken down and felt utterly helpless. But, understanding the weight of the role bestowed upon her, Mary humbly recognizes her place in the story. When the angel knocks her entire world askew, rather than attempt to right it, she shifts her perspective to one that centers this new reality.
For anyone who follows the way of Jesus long enough, this feeling of being knocked askew should be somewhat familiar. None of us has had our world “tilted aslant” as much as Mary has, so how much more should our reaction mirror hers: “I am the Lord’s servant.”
When your plans don’t go your way – whether it’s as massive an event as God redirecting the next decade of your life or as simple as a grain of sand in the gears of your perfectly ordered schedule – how do you react? Are you so focused on the sadness of what could have been or the anger at what was lost that you are unable to see the beauty of what God is crafting in your soul and in his plans for your life? Find ways to practice reacting as Mary did today.