Many thanks to Leslie R. of Heaven’s Overlook for another beautiful guest post.  You can read some of her previous posts here here here and here. Thanks so much Leslie!

The fact that Mary and Elizabeth found shelter in each other, and they weren’t even the same age is my favorite part of the story.  Imagine Mary for just a moment.  Finding out that she is pregnant, she travels one hundred miles on foot from Nazareth to the hill country of the Judean Wilderness to breathe with Elizabeth, who was quite a bit older, also pregnant, six months along.  With reverence, Elizabeth greets Mary with the words, “Blessed art thou among women.”

Defined as cousins, which at the time could have meant actual relatives, but as the Bible Dictionary states, they were “kinswomen.” These two women, with great distance between their homes and ages, used words to heal and comfort in a time of confusion, wonder, and awe.  In her greatest moment of need, Mary turned to God when she turned to Elizabeth.  There is something sacred about the careful, uncommon relationships that can surface in our lives when we least expect them.

Can you imagine being pregnant with swollen toes that look like sausages, thick ankles, living with very little room to breathe because a baby is housed between your ribs? And when you are just about to give birth, weeks away, rather than screaming and complaining, you look up and sing a psalm to the Lord. Mary’s psalm pressed against heaven with the words: “My Soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior” (Luke 1: 46-47).

And in the form of a psalm we hear the same hushed verses of Hannah, another woman full with child, singing to the Lord, “My heart rejoiceth in the Lord and mine horn is exalted in the Lord” (1 Samuel 2:1). Both of these women looked up as they sang psalms threading to heaven.  Do your remember being pregnant, or wishing to be pregnant and filling the air with psalms? In know there were some days when a psalm was the last thing that graced my lips. Oh, how quickly the Lord teaches me.

“There are wide areas of our society from which the spirit of prayer and reverence and worship has vanished.  Men and women in many circles are clever, interesting, or brilliant, but they lack one crucial element in a complete life—They do not look up.”     ~~~Howard W. Hunter

In an ever-moving world these women, perhaps in their most difficult moments, found a way to stillness. I love the words of the poet T.S. Eliot who describes this notion of finding the “still points in the turning world.”  During perhaps the busiest time of this year how are you holding stillness enough to sing your psalms to the Lord? My syllables are scattered and sacred where the verses blend behind the sounds of one child asking for a snack, the other reading me Amelia Bedelia, and the other one memorizing facts for a science test. Long verses blend while I am bedside, trying to shape my muddled thoughts into prayers at both ends of the day. With this blessed and broken-down soul, the Lord is always there for me, for just one more day, smoothing the covers up over my shoulders when I ask, “Who is going to take care of me?”

My psalm is always filled with the women in my life who have blessed me because of their words and shelter, such as those of Elizabeth to Mary. Here’s wishing you some stillness in your moving world.  Here’s a hope that you will look back on this year and find five “still points” that will draw you closer to where you have been and where you are going. With five points to a star, perhaps sitting in stillness and gathering in will guide you closer to the Savior during this holiday season.  And of course, we would love to hear about one or two of your still points.