late nights and Advent wonder

This last week or so I've had more of them than usual.  Oddly enough, it's twelve thirty and I'm not remotely sleepy.  I'm also in denial about the fact that I have to be up at seven for work.  Eh, six and a half hours, no problem.  I'll get to sleep in on Friday. :)

The main reasons I've been up so late are homework, and...oh.  Homework.  Yeah, that's it.  Mostly it's self-inflicted (coughprocrastinationcough) but I'm pretty okay with that.  Honestly, if I didn't have to get up as early as I do tomorrow I'd just stay up and write my very last paper and be done with it.  I might have been able to anyway if I hadn't spent so much time playing dumb games on facebook  chatting with my husband who was playing a computer game  procrastinating.  Ugh.

Anyway, being up this late tonight makes me wonder...it's Advent.  Eleven days before the birth of Jesus, was Mary sitting up, looking out her window, wondering what the future held?  A young, very pregnant girl, probably about to set out on the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  What was she feeling?  Fear?  Excitement?  Anticipation?  Nervousness?  All of the above?

Was she feeling hope?  She knew that the baby in her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

She was carrying, inside her body, God made Man.

Did she feel wonder?  Awe?  Amazement?

Hope?

Some days I fret, not knowing what the future will hold.  I mean, yes, tomorrow I'm getting up and going to work and coming home and going back to work.  We'll celebrate Christmas soon, the next semester will start, in a year and a half we'll finish college.

But will we?  We have no idea what will happen between now and then.  I don't even know what's going to occur in the next hour, the next minute.

But I have hope.  Because although my future might not be certain to me, it's certain to God--that God-made-flesh who was born from Mary, born in a stable, born into a sinful, dark world.

It's still a sinful world.  But Christ, the Light, was born into it, and now a Light shines in the darkness.

There is hope for the future, because that Light has already been there.  God knows what will happen tomorrow, next week, next year.  Nothing will happen in my life without his knowing about it.

And everything that happens to me, God will work for good.

Did Mary know that?  Did she know how eternity-changing her Son's birth would be?  Did she know, anticipating the pains of childbirth, that her baby would experience hell-- for her?  For the world?

I do.  I know what that baby experienced when he became a man.

He did it for me.