Driving home from work in the dark last night, I heard one of my favorite traditional Christmas carols on the radio. In it, a pregnant Mary is being led to Bethlehem with Joseph and they pass a cherry tree (the hymn comes from England). Mary asks Joseph to stop and pick her some cherries, citing the baby in her womb. Joseph isn’t having it. He looks at her and says, “The father of your child can pick the cherries for you.”

How bold. How human. How often we forget, after hearing the story of the birth of Jesus our whole lives, what it must have actually been like for everyone involved.

Mary was a very young peasant girl. A girl. Some biblical scholars put her age at 13. She became pregnant out of wedlock, even though she was promised in marriage to Joseph, an older man she may have not known at all.

When I think of the story of Mary, about the Annunciation and the Nativity, I can only think of the popular political catchphrase, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Mary was a girl. Mary was poor. Mary was uneducated. Mary lived in a world where she belonged to her father, until she belonged to another man. Yet, Mary said yes to God. She said yes to danger, and to the unknown, and to the breaking of all the social and cultural norms of her day. She said yes.

What would it mean, this Advent, if we spent less time focusing on the coming of Jesus and instead looking at the life, choices, and story of Mary?

What could we learn about courage, persistence, and reckoning with truth if we looked to a young teenage girl from Palestine?