Exactly Right

“I look at the situation before me as if it were exactly right for me.” ~Madame Guyon

Scripture: Luke 1:26–38

The angel said to Mary, “You have found favor with God. You will be with
child and give birth to a son” (Luke 1:30–31). The angelic announcement,
which brings us such joy, brought unspeakable hardship to Mary. Let’s not
forget.

From the beginning, rumors swirled around her character. (The Pharisaic
brush-off, “[At least] we’re not born of fornication” [John 8:41] is
perpetuated in the ancient Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings that
describes Jesus as “the illegitimate son of Mary.”)

And then there was Mary’s husband-to-be Joseph and his hasty decision to
“put her away”; the long journey to Bethlehem in the final days of her
pregnancy; the unassisted birth in a cold, filthy cave; the perilous flight
to escape Herod’s fury—all the beginning of sorrows that culminated at the
foot of the cross when a sword, as Simon prophesied, was thrust to the hilt
into Mary’s soul.

But Mary knew that her lot was ordained by God and humbly accepted His
will: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said” (Luke
1:38). We must learn her words as well.

We must learn them in the realities of life that are thrust upon us: in the
care of an aging, ill-tempered parent or a disagreeable, ADHD child; in a
trying and tiresome marriage where nothing works and nothing seems to
matter; in the humbling of physical disablement or disfigurement; in the
burden of prolonged pain and suffering; in the cramping restrictions of
mindless and meaningless work; in the emptiness of a lonely and loveless
existence; in the losses and limitations that accompany old age.

If we plan to move into intimacy with Jesus, we must abandon our whole
existence, offering it up to Him. We must believe that every circumstance of
our life, every moment of our life as well as the course of our entire life,
anything and everything that happens to us, has come to us by God’s will and
by His permission and is exactly what we need.

The only way to learn Mary’s words is to know that God’s will is “good,
acceptable and perfect” and to accept day by day the conditions and
circumstances He permits; to lay down our will and patiently submit to His
will as it is presented to us day by day in the form of the people with whom
we have to live and work and in the things that keep happening to us.

I think of Jeanne Guyon, a seventeenth-century woman who, at age sixteen,
was forced into an arranged marriage with an invalid forty years older than she. She
found her marriage to be a place of utter humiliation. Her husband was an
angry melancholic. Her mother-in-law was a merciless critic. Even her
servant-girl despised her. Despite her best attempts at devotion to her
husband and family, she found herself subject to relentless criticism and
hostility.

Forbidden by her husband to go to church, she sought God in His Word and
worshiped him in secret. There in that place, alone with God, she learned
that each situation before her was, as she put it, “exactly right,” and
thus, despite her dreary circumstances, she was “perfectly fine—within the
safe hands of God.”[1]

She writes, “Here is a true spiritual principle that the Lord will not deny:
God gives us the cross and the cross gives us God . . . Abandonment [to His
Cross] is the key to the inward spiritual life. It is the key to fathomless
Depths” (from Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ).

This, then, is our prayer: “May it be to me as you have said.”[2]

He said, “I will forget the dying faces;
The empty places,
They shall be filled again.
O voices moaning deep within me cease.”
But vain the word: vain, vain;
Not in forgetting lieth peace.

He said, “I will accept the breaking sorrow
Which God tomorrow
Will to his son explain.”
Then did the turmoil deep within him cease.
Not vain the word: vain, vain;
For in acceptance lieth peace.

~Amy Carmichael

[1] I’m not suggesting that anyone submit to prolonged brutality and abuse,
but only, in the words of the AA slogan, that we “accept those things we
cannot change.”

[2] “But,” you say, “I’m a woman/man of action; I make things happen. This
counsel is much too passive for me.” Consider Mary, the mother of our Lord, whose “passivity” brought salvation. Is not wisdom justified in her deeds?