The Answer Is Often Found In What We Magnify

​My life has been full of uncertainty and at times fear the last several years. Divorce has played no small part in that. Additionally, it feels like more and more, life in general, within all of its worldly and secular composition, wants to wield uncertainty and fear over my life.

The Christmas story has a character that experienced maybe the most uncertain and fearful human experience known to man. Mary, likely no older than a teen, carrying the son of God while also carrying her virginity.

Uncertainty?

Fearful?

There's a story in the bible that tells us about the pregnant Mary going to visit a woman named Elizabeth. During the visit, Elizabeth says to Mary, "blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”

In other words, Elizabeth is acknowledging all that it must have taken for Mary to take God's word about this child she was carrying. Then Mary does us all a favor and explains how she was able to do that. Mary says:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant."

Mary says, my soul magnifies the Lord.....

In every moment of our lives, we get this beautiful gift, an opportunity, to decide what our souls will magnify. The world more often than not invites our souls to magnify uncertainty and fear, while always at the same time God invites us to magnify him.

The God who has indeed reminded us of little more than he has reminded us to "fear not."

Magnify: to make something larger or more prominent in our lives.

When it comes to my anxieties in life, and at times my depression, when it comes to most any challenging emotion I face in this life, almost always it is a result of what I choose to magnify. What I choose to make most prominent.

Or worded another way, those challenging emotions always come when I am choosing to magnify anything other than God in my life.

Post-divorce, it has been easy to magnify the various challenges that come with divorce in my life - finances, loneliness, time away from my boys. And yet, the answer to soothing all of those various challenges hasn't varied at all: magnify God.

For those of us celebrating Christmas, we get the benefit of celebrating the miracle of it all, the pageantry and traditions and glorious melodies. But for Mary, the mother of that first Christmas, Mary had to have faith that her uncertainties and fears would ultimately lead her to delivering us our Christmas miracle, that baby in a manger.

Mary had to choose what she was going to magnify.

She chose God.

We all have fears and uncertainties we carry as we head to Bethlehem. Sometimes the answer for them isn't always easy, yet it is always clear.

Magnify God.

Most of my life challenges don't come at the hands of what I am going through, they come at the hands of what I am choosing to magnify.

On the way to Bethlehem, it's a great question to ask ourselves.

What am I choosing to magnify today?

It's the perfect season to more than ever make that choice God. It's the perfect season to choose forever the baby in a manger.