I wake this morning to the sound of rain pounding on our back porch. I lay still and listen. I guess it’s fitting that the weather would be inclement today. It’s probably snowing at home. And I’m sure it’s icing in more places. Inconvenient to the holiday travelers.

This week I think about inconvenience.

Not the stuck in traffic or the grocery store is out of your cereal kind of inconvenience. The dramatic kind, the sort that interrupts your day or your life with news you never expected or always dreaded. The “Mary, virgin, you’re going to have a baby” sort of inconvenience.

So many times I wonder, checking the tenderness of my heart, “God, do you mean this for me? Now? This thing for this moment? Couldn’t it be later? Better? More? Less? Anything but?” Even joy feels inconvenient sometimes. I want to hang on to the apathy or fear because it feels more comfortable there, more fitting for a kid as disappointing as I am.

I think about this all week: why is virginity so important for the mother of Jesus to possess? I think all my life I have assumed that the reason for her virginity was because only purity can beget purity and this might be my Catholic heritage hanging on a bit. December 8th, my birthday, falls on the Day of Immaculate Conception I’ve always been told–perhaps I am destined to think about such things. To me, this woman in white and blue is the epitome of purity, the only picture of what God requires from those he can use.

I realize recently how contrary to the gospel that thinking is.

And I may speak heresy here, forgive me, I’m still stumbling around these truths.

I think God could have used, just as easily, a stained and worn woman, a broken and cast aside girl, someone with a story of sins a mile high, and he did. They are written there in the lineage of Jesus—Rahab and Tamar, near Leah and Bathsheba, women who strung the threads of sin into their story, who bought their impurity at the hands of deceived men.

This morning I land on this: it was not her virginity that prized Mary above them all, she who was not sinless, who had committed sins of fear and envy, disobedience and untruth. She was not holy and this was not her reward, this Inconvenient Conception. It might have been any girl in that lineage, at any time. Her child was not the reward of her purity, He was the result of the miraculous.

And this is the only reason why an impossible conception was hers.

I think about that this morning. I think about the inconvenient things, the broken things, the difficult things, the ways I have worked for honesty and purity and faith and sometimes seen no reward. I think about how God does miracles in the middle of impossible situations and surprises the world with his methods. Not as rewards (His grace is more beautiful than a system of that caliber), but as proof of His goodness.

I weep on that. As this year closes out, as I think about how faithlessly I have been and how brokenly I have lived. I think past regrettable ways I have acted and unfortunate things I have said. I process the reward I have now, this almost inconvenient peace (or at the very least, unmerited peace).

I think to myself: Thank you Father, that you do not always save the best things for the best behaved, thank you that sometimes you choose us on the merit of the miracle alone.

I collect favorites.

This morning, while we’re all still disheveled and waking, one of my roommates stands in front of me and demands to know what to get for Christmas for the girl who doesn’t keep anything. Before I can say anything, there is a chorus of “…and hugs don’t count!”

So I say time, but I am vetoed. I say a Starbucks gift card since it seems the only charges on my account are from there, they say that’s like giving me money and I don’t need that. Finally we settle on trying to find a cheap armchair from a thrift store. I have an empty corner in my room next to the window and I want to sit there in the morning, with coffee and quiet.

The only things I keep are my favorites. Mostly art, some books. And people. People are my favorite. You are probably one of my favorites. I’ve probably said that to your face and you laughed at me because you heard me say it to another face moments before. I love you. Don’t you get that? You are my favorite. I collect my favorites and I keep them. Forever.

My favorite line in a song of all time is this: His law is love and His gospel is peace. I have never known why I love it so much. Maybe the cadence? Maybe the alliteration (alliteration is my favorite)? Maybe the tremor in our voices when we sing that line? I don’t know.

I sat across from a friend the other day and she wept, the gospel is so hard, so demanding, unrelenting, it makes us change and it’s hard, I’m finished. I’m done.

I know, I said. And that’s okay.

I was not agreeing with her, that the gospel is hard, demanding, unrelenting. I was just saying, “I know how you feel.” And I do. There have been times when the law has felt like chains and the angst of the gospel has demanded more of me than I have ever had to give. But the truth is that his law is only love and his gospel is only peace, and it’s my feelings that are wrong.

This year when I sing this hymn, though, I am thinking of how only the confidence of truth sets us free. Because we can know something and not really know it. We can believe something and still struggle to believe it. We can feel the heavy weight of something and not feel the freedom of the weight.

God incarnate came and taught us to love. He came to break chains of oppression, to set slaves free. And these people around us, these brothers and sisters, they’re slaves. We feel like slaves sometimes too. But we who are children of God, we know that that law is only there to show us our need and that the gospel is only there because we couldn’t do it on our own.

The law is love.
The gospel is peace.

It is my confidence in the truth of God’s character that makes me trust Him. I trust that He loves me because I trust that God is love, not because I feel loved. I trust that He has peace for me, not because I feel peace, but because I know that He is the Prince of Peace.

That alone is worth the praise of His holy name.

That is my real and truest favorite.

I thought I’d finished my post on the last verse of the hymn earlier today, but reason won out and I deleted it. You might have been one of the few who got to read a bit of that blather in the ten minutes it was up and I’m sorry if you did.

A friend asked me last week if I had any regrets and I answered truthfully when I said I did not.

The truth is that so much of life is lived wrought with difficulty, but regret is a backward motion and living can only be done forward. Every experience in my life has led me toward a deeper truth of God character and more transparency in my own. If we try to play chess with life, there is an almost certainty we will be the checkmated.

I believe that God is sovereign and also that He is good, and that He is so good that He has ordained a path for us that brings us the most joy and Him the most glory. I would stake my life on that belief. I would die on that belief. And not because I have any illusions that the most joy to be had will be had on earth. I’m confident that my most blissful earthly moment will not be a fraction of the joy I’ll experience on the threshold of eternity.

So sometimes the paths during life feel miserable. The paths of the past few weeks have felt crushing. I am feeling that familiar December angst pushing me in, and my soul is asking questions that are probably better left unasked. I feel unsafe–there is nowhere to go where there is complete trust, complete faith, complete love.

And then I come home, put on my smart wool socks and sweat pants, take out my contacts, curl up with a good book. In a few hours Season comes in with chili and cornbread and we sit side by side on my down comforter and eat chili out of holiday mugs. Another hour later she brings in spiced apple cider and we talk. She leaves and soon Jenna comes in, sprawls across my bed, and tells me how the gospel was made real to her today. I put five versions of O Come, O Come Emmanuel on my playlist and begin to write the final verse of the hymn. This, what you’re reading now.

The truth is that life is lived forward and there are moments of misery, hopelessness, but there are glimpses of heaven, hope, and unconditional love. He is making safe the way to heaven. He closes the paths on misery. But it is all done forwardly, intentionally, and in certainty of the end of the story.