David: The December issue of National Geographic magazine features a lead article by the Christian writer Ann Lamott. It’s called Celebrating in the Pandemic.

Karen: Anne Lamott is a crossover writer, and this is what the subtitle says under the celebrating in the pandemic.

David: Cross over, what do you mean?

Karen: She writes in the religious markets and has a real voice in the non-religious markets.

David: Yeah, good for her.

Karen: Yeah, good for her. We’re missing holiday closeness just when we needed most, but even grim uncertain times hold sparks of love and light.

Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast, featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David: I think it’s great, Karen, when Christian writers are published in established secular magazines, like of all places in the National Geographic.

Karen: And this is the lead article for the month of December and perhaps that’s why, because of the Christmas season that they’ve included.

David: More power to Anne Lamott, huh?

Karen: Yeah, I love it because she says in her article, let me read a little bit from the first page. If we are wise we will avoid large gatherings, dinner indoors with family and old friends and goes on that way. But does this mean we lose the nurture, bonding, and sacred silliness that ceremonies provided? Maybe we can be fully immersed in the Holy, even as we keep ourselves in our beloved safe. Maybe broken isn’t the end of the world. Maybe broken as a new beginning, a portal. And then she says this, let’s start with what we mean by holy.

David: It’s unusual, very unusual.

Karen: It’s wonderful. It’s a flooding. Yeah. Anyway, this has been an unusual year for families and it looks like Christmas will be as abnormal as Thanksgiving was.

Karen: Because of our age, you’re in your 80s, I’m in my 70s. We decided that we were not going to take any risks with the COVID-19 epidemic. We live outside of Chicago and Illinois has a high percentage rate of positivity.

David: Just about everywhere does.

Karen: Everywhere does, no. So why risk it? And particularly with a vaccine coming around the corner next year, sometime I would rather not die of COVID-19 because I’ve been careless with some protection coming around the corner. So we really have isolated ourselves. We don’t go out very much if we do. We wear masks and we canceled our Thanksgiving gathering and the same will be for Christmas. And the kids, our adult children have been very understanding because they don’t want to just spread anything to us. I appreciate that no one is giving me any pushback on this. But I had this funny thing that happened. The table was all set for Thanksgiving meal. I do this seasonally. I reset the dining room table for whatever.

David: The dining room table is always set.

Karen: It’s always set for whatever season is coming up.

David: Whatever unexpected guests might come.

Karen: So I went downstairs and the Thanksgiving table was all set. And I was, instead of filled with, “Oh dear, we’re not going to have a meal together,” filled with joy because I started to think of how many people have sat around that very dining room table. How much joy we have shared, how much of our lives we have shared, how many new people we’ve gotten acquainted with, how many tears have been shed, how much laughter. And you know, I just all of a sudden, I’m getting all choked up even now thinking about it, I realized what a sacred place that table had become in that common dining room of our home. And so I began to give thanks for the fact that, not lament that we weren’t going to be having Thanksgiving this year, but to give thanks for the fact that this was a physical symbol of a mighty work of God, an extension of sacred hospitality in a world that is not a very hospitable world. So that’s the thing that hit me. And I think it was an incident that sort of set a marker for the whole approach I’ve tried to take toward our entire very different holiday season that we’ve been having this year.

David: Let’s go back, Karen, just to the scriptures to give us a start on our visit. Sometimes we idealize what went on in the birth of Christ.

Karen: You think? Well, some of it is extraordinary.

David: It’s incredible, the angel choir, you know, all of that. But this is how the story begins in Matthew. It says, this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child.

Now, I read that as though that’s the end of the sentence, but the sentence goes on to say, through the Holy Spirit. I’m just trying to think what a blow that was to Joseph, who was a righteous man, but him trying to process, you know, that’s worth the COVID crisis of today because this is a huge personal dilemma for him.

Karen: And the strictures on sexuality outside of the marriage environment were so much more.

David: Oh, they’re severe.

Karen: Severe at that time. A woman taken in adultery could be stoned to death.

David: Yes. Which even you say those words is a horrible, horrible way to die.

Karen: A horrible way to die. And so we have a culture that we don’t really comprehend when we read back through the history with our contemporary Western, particularly Western thinking.

David: In all of the sexual openness.

Karen: Yeah, the sexual openness of our culture. But the role of a young woman in those days too, I don’t think we’d comprehend. I mean, many of them were married at very young ages and there’s some speculation that she could have been 13 or 14. And here’s this older man who betrothed himself to her, her to him. And in that time, betrothed was a bond. It was a sacred bond, a legal bond. And for her to then become pregnant was an extraordinary indicator that she’d had sex outside of marriage, outside of the covenant of the betrothal bond and would be susceptible to a stoning process.

David: I was thinking in terms of what Joseph is.

Karen: His dilemma.

David: But Mary has that dilemma as well. It’s very difficult. It says Joseph, her husband, was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace. He had in mind to divorce her quietly. Then something unusual happens. After he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, no, I wish we could cut out that little phrase in a dream. I mean, if an angel of the Lord comes and appears, that’s one thing. But in a dream, that’s something else. I know every so often I’ll have a strange dream and I’ll wake up, why a crazy dream?

Karen: And I say, well, tell me what you, tell me what you dreamed and I’ll tell you what it meant.

David: You know, then you try to reconstruct what happened.

Karen: You can’t remember that.

David: So this was a dream saying, Joseph, don’t be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

Karen: Which is an extraordinary story, isn’t it?

David: She would give birth to a son. You are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. All of that. It’s very hard to understand it and process it. So now another huge thing. And now I’m skipping over from the book of Matthew to the book of Luke. In those days, Caesar Augustus, that’s the Roman emperor, a world emperor, has issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. Now the people back then, they weren’t counting heads to see how many people they were. They knew what was coming. They were going to be taxed. And so there had to be the census.

So the Roman government got all that was coming to them. This was the first census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And next complication here, everyone went to his hometown to register. So Joseph knows now that Mary is expecting and they have to go from up in Galilee all the way to Bethlehem south of Jerusalem. And her due date is going to come. Now what are they going to do? Then you have the whole story about the birthing that is done in a manger. So it’s not in a. ..

Karen: Yeah, there’s no room in the inn. But actually, you know, when you look at this story and you begin to parse it out and say, as we’re talking about, find the activity of God in this story, there was a blessing that there was no room in the inn because inns those days, we’re just big common rooms. So you’re going to have a baby in the corner with all of these strangers around and you know, the trauma of childbirth. That was a grace that there was no room in that inn. And they found a place where they could be sheltered and safe.

David: I kind of think of it even now. We’ve been watching Call the Midwife. I wonder if they called the midwife. I know that if I were in Joseph’s position, I would be totally inept.

Karen: Totally inept to help your wife bear a child. Yeah. Well, I think there was much more of an understanding at that time because midwives, you know, there were women in every community who were knowledgeable about birthing and then, and would help. But it certainly takes a modern reality moment when we watch Call the Midwives. And of course, that PBS show is set right after the war in England. But you do watch that and think, you know, at least two births per show, at least two births, maybe three. What would you do if you’re a young woman, away from your family?

David: What would I do if I were a man? I don’t know how to be helpful.

Karen: Was she capable of knowing how to birth this baby by herself? I mean, it’s just, it’s heart wrenching when you think about it. All the complications of that. Yeah. Wow.

David: And then, very quickly, you know, all of heaven is excited about this. And the angels appear before the shepherds. And then the shepherds very quickly appear before Joseph and Mary.

Karen: And they find the babe and the mother and the babe is wrapped in swaddling clothes. So there’s been at least a little bit of time for them to get used to this phenomenon.

David: And they’re very excited, the shepherds, they go out and begin to tell everybody what has happened. Then this really incredible verse, but Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. So she’s processing all of this from a spiritual perspective. That word, ponder, I don’t use that normally in my conversation. So I looked up in the dictionary and it has the same background as far as the word pound. So it’s, there’s a weighing process that’s going on. Mary is weighing these things in her mind. She’s processing what is God trying to do in all of this. And it’s a very good picture of what really should go on in terms of the Christmas season. I’m going to just put into a sentence and get to that. I feel very good about it when I can finally get it into a sentence. When life is confusing and seemingly out of control, like it was back in that day, and like it is now in terms of the pandemic that is going on and such, when life is confusing and seemingly out of control, make time to talk with God regarding his perspective. And I’m using that talk with God in place of the word ponder, but that’s kind of what it is. It’s processing, not just in your own mind, but processing with God as the foundation to all of your thoughts. What are you doing in all this, God? And there is that beautiful picture of Mary in the midst of all this, finding her stability by doing exactly that.

Karen: Well, I think that’s a picture that we can take into our COVID-19 days. I was talking with my doctor. We had a teleconference call. My general physician had some tests run and she was just running through with me by phone or what actually it was by Zoom. And she said, “Well, how are you doing?” I said, “Well, doing great.” I said, “Fortunately, my husband and I like one another.” And she laughed and she said, “Yeah, that’s better than my parents.” And I said, “Yeah, it can get kind of dangerous if you don’t like one another.” She said, “Yeah, we’ve just been intervening in their marriage. They’re, you know, I don’t know, 50 year old marriage or whatever and like that.” And I said, “Well, are you the oldest daughter?” She said, “I have other sisters, but they’re not helping much.” So we were laughing.

But it was a little picture into what so many families are going through right now because you’re cloistered literally with people you have not worked out the difficulties of your relationship with. And so there are two ways that can go. It can get worse. You can become much more uptight. You can throw terrible words at one another. You can stop talking to one another or you can choose to say, now is the time this has been given to us to work these difficulties out. Let’s see if we can hear one another. If we can come to a consensus that we can both live with, you know, whatever those sorts of things are that need to heal a relationship and to restore. That’s the opportunity that’s given in these days to many people who don’t like the fact that they’re pod that they’re having to live with and do their holidays with. Is this one or two other people they really don’t care about?

David: In a sense, this is really what Anne Lamott is writing about in the article that she’s saying, you know, in difficult times, make the best of it. But she’s saying in a much more profound way than I’ve just said.

Karen: It’s more than just make the best of it. It is intentionally look for the good and intentionally focus on what is good. You know, we’re just amazed that it’s the lead article in the National Geographic for December 2020. Her point here is that these good things are often very near, very close, very integral to our living, but they don’t shout at us. She doesn’t use those words. I mean, they don’t trip us up. They have to be found. You have to deliberately look for them. You have to determine you’re going to see those things. And that’s what her point is.

David: Let me read just a little bit of what she’s written here. Everything, our whole system of life, family, travel has ground to a halt. So if broken is what we’ve got, where do we begin the repairs? One possible solution is how the ancient Japanese repaired broken pottery with gold along the mended spots. You dishonor things if you won’t admit they’re broken. You value them by repairing them. The gold edging adds to the broken things beauty. You adorn the cracks, so now they really show. This is just an interesting way to explain what she’s talking about.

Karen: And she goes on in the article to talk about finding the holy. And she says it’s not just related to what is divine in life. It’s actually woven all through life, which I think is a beautiful way of looking at what is sacred. The holy is not a spectacle. The rockets on stage, for instance, at the Taj Mahal backed by the Marmotab or Tako Kwa. This is why we love Ayatollah Mah. It is more often felt in small graces and blessings, although you do have to be paying attention to catch the momentousness of the moment. That’s the rub. It’s all around us, above us, below us, and inside us all the time. It’s here, but we’re often not here.

Let me read the next paragraph. Maybe our definition of holy and whole, W-H-O-L-E, have to change. The early morning is holy. Holy is the warmth of the grocer or grandchild. Or a bowl of homegrown tomatoes from the neighbor who once reported you on Next Door, that’s the neighbor app. She goes on and concludes, I’m whole, whole-ish, older, slower, and I have a few dings, but I’m still holy. Beautiful, isn’t it?

David: Yeah. Let’s get in a practical thing here. We’re saying when life is confusing and seemingly out of control, make time to talk with God regarding his perspective. How do you do that?

Karen: Well, I try and focus my mind first thing in the morning, sometimes before I’m even out of bed. I mean, because all the negatives can rush at you, I have to do this and this didn’t get done and I need to call so-and-so and I’ll drop. We’re still in this COVID thing and how long am I going to be stuck here and, you know, all of that stuff wants to come rushing in. That’s the negative. And I think the enemy uses those things in our lives to defeat us and make us turn in on the things that are wrong, to focus on the things that are wrong.

So I wake up in the morning and I think I’m going to concentrate on letting joy fill my life before I’ve even gotten out of bed. I’m a child of the King. What does that mean? It means I’m loved. It means I’m preferred. It means I bring him joy when I function with the gifts that he’s given me. It’s the source of happiness. And so today I’m going to just sit here and let that reality flood me and it always does every single morning. And so once I feel that, not just know it in my head, but feel it in my body.

David: You’re not saying this out loud. You’re processing it in your mind.

Karen: No, it’s a mental construct. It’s a meditation. It’s more of a meditation. And then, you know, I remind myself of whatever scriptures we’ve been working with and that’s it. I’m ready for the day and eager to begin even though we’ve been under house lock for months, you know, and you are my pod. I’m your pod.

David: That word may throw people.

Karen: Well, they say stick with your pod. CDC Center for Disease Control is stay with your pod and the people you’ve been living with.

David: The people you’re living with. We’re the two P’s in this pod.

Karen: But that, I think, is the practice that scripture really teaches us to do when we’re in difficult times or when we’re surrounded by evil forces. I mean, it’s all through the New Testament. I was looking just briefly through my scripture and I came up with be very careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music. In your heart to the Lord, always give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Well, that’s it right there. And I can find all kinds of passages that give that emphasis. I mean, it’s an extraordinary mental, emotional, and psychological discipline.

David: Mine is going to be a little bit like yours, but it doesn’t have the same lyrical quality.

Karen: You’re more the meat and potato kind of guy, right?

David: Let’s go back to the sentence. When life is confusing and seemingly out of control, like in a pandemic, make time to talk with God regarding his perspective. I have come to the place now where I do this probably as habitually as you have this way of waking up, but I start the day with scripture and then one of my prayers is always to say, Lord, here are the things, I keep lists, here are the things that I need to get done. Which one would you say is the greatest need for me to concentrate on? What’s the priority? Not in my mind, because I know in my mind it’ll be to do the fun things and to put off the things I find difficult. But I say, “Lord, let me know just as I’m processing this with you in this quiet. What is your priority for this day?” Then I say to myself, if I can get that priority done, even though I may not get some of the other things on my list done, I have in a sense looked at this day and prioritized it from a divine perspective to the best of my ability. And if I find that the same priority comes up several days in a row, because I procrastinated or I let other things interfere there, but I find that this is a very helpful discipline for me to be able to say, okay, God, and in my mind, I feel that is going back to what Mary was doing. She was pondering or she was processing these things in her mind, which is a very good idea.

Karen: So what we’re saying to people is this is a tool that can help you not only help you, get you through, but it can make this COVID-19 isolation one of the best periods of your life. I mean, you may even look back on it and say, thank goodness. I mean, it was hard to go through, but thank goodness that we did, because this happened and this happened. And I got this completed and I came to this understanding. And that’s really what you want to have happen in difficult circumstances. I mean, we’ve all had difficult circumstances. We’ve had decades of living and you just don’t get that much living behind you without going through really rough things.

David: Yeah. And don’t just clip that off real fast, because we know that there have been families where loved ones have been lost. We know how traumatic that is. It’s just incredibly difficult.

Karen: Well, and financial collapses. I mean, we can go on down the list.

David: There are so many stories.

Karen: You know, people being evicted from their homes. This is gruesome. This is absolutely, absolutely gruesome. So, in the midst of that sort of thing, as we’ve had those experiences in our lives, I can almost guarantee that in every single one of them, after we’ve gotten through them, and this is how long we’ve been married, 50, 59 years or something like that. We have looked back and said, I wouldn’t choose to go through that again, but I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned from it. The good things that came out of it were worth going through the awful times, the bad hard times that we went through. And I hear that from many other people, you know, this was the good that came out of it. So that’s what we’re asking people to focus their minds on these days. Not on the isolation, not on the inconveniences, not on the things that are happening to you that you wouldn’t have chosen to have happen to you, but on the fact that there is a God working in these circumstances who can bring good out of them. And that also is beyond our control, but not beyond our attention.

David: There is a great illustration with this article in the National Geographic. In fact, I would say, as I’ve opened the magazine here, that takes up at least half the space of those two pages.

Karen: Two-thirds illustration.

David: Yeah, and it’s a very simple picture, line drawing, color, but not a lot of color. And it basically shows a family at a very large Thanksgiving table, and there are only four people. There is the father, and he’s lighting the candle in the middle of the table, and a mother. And it looks like a son and a daughter, if I’m judging the ages here. But it’s a table that has room for a lot more people. Yes, right.

But they’re not going to have a lot more people this year. It’s just the people in the pod, if you put it, the people who live together in the house. And, Karen, that would be just a normal picture, but the table is not on a rug or a hardwood floor. The table is resting on a huge hand. I don’t know if I am explaining this the way I want, but it would be like me if I were God putting out my palm, and then on top of that would be the scene of the Thanksgiving table. But it has this great truth underlying it, which is God is holding us up.

Karen: Oh, that’s extraordinary.

David: Yeah, it’s amazing to me. If you saw that illustration in Christianity today, you say, that’s a good illustration, but when you see it in National Geographic, you think, where did that come from?

Karen: Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing.

David: And that article is going to stick with me during these weeks. And also that visual is going to stick with me, and it’s going to be this awareness that God is underneath all of what is happening for those who put their trust in Him, and what a privilege we have to process that with Him. When life is confusing, seemingly out of control, take the time to talk with God regarding His perspective. That’s not easy, but it’s a wonderful process, and I’m just commending this to people. And I would say both of us are people who live this way, and are so grateful for that. I think if we didn’t have that hand underneath the table, it would be rough. Yeah, it would be really, really rough, but we do have that hand, which is thank you, Jesus.

Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast, and if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all lowercase letters, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2020 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.