You Are A Dwelling Place of the Most High God:
A Devotional from Luke 1: 26-38

“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent…to a virgin named Mary. And He said to her ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you…you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High.’ “

When I was younger, it bothered me that Jesus addressed his mother as “woman” throughout the gospels. That was long before I had grown into my own womanhood, into the sisterhood of women. Long before I knew what it meant to be a woman. Now I do.
And I hear that word in a new light. “Woman,” He calls her. Archetypal. Not just one woman among many, but The Woman, in the same way Eve was “woman” at creation. In her very being, Mary embodies all of womanhood’s beauty, goodness and grace. She is “woman” as woman was created to be. She is all of us and all of our experiences in one. The Woman among women.
God could have chosen to break upon the scene of human history to save us from our very selves in any way He wanted. It could have been overtly grand and glorious and terrifying. He could have shaken the foundations of the earth with His coming and darkened the universe only to light it up again. He could have put on a fantastic show.
But He chose instead to create a vessel that could cradle His greatness and to be borne by and born of a woman. The glory that happens in the womb of a woman may just be God’s best show of all. And the idea that our salvation is both borne and born? That the waiting world barely notices that it is pregnant with hope? That God is working out the salvation of the world in secret ways with a woman as His only companion? Do you feel the deep, rich grace in that?
Mary shows us what it means to be woman, to bear a soul that is shaped like our bodies, meant to receive life-giving love, to gestate it with expectant hope and to bear it out into the world through the hard work that it is to labor. This is our spiritual calling as much as it our physical being. It is not dependent on whether or not you ever bear a babe in your womb, it is because you bear the Babe called King of Kings inside you.
He dwells in you. Redeeming, loving, saving from right there in the very center of your being. You, too, can live full of grace. There may not be angel’s wings and glory rays to announce His presence, but He longs to live in you, to be made incarnate in the person of you, to dwell within you so that your very flesh magnifies Him out into the world.
This is the key to being a Christ-bearer. He asks to be allowed in to the deepest part of us so that we might bear the presence of Him who is called Most High in our very being. He asks to dwell in us. And when we offer our “yes”, when offer ourselves to serve His purposes, He hovers. He stays with us. He places His shadow over us so we walk always covered by Him, His presence growing within us while His Spirit surrounds us.
We stand together under the shadow of the Spirit and the Most High God comes to dwell in us. In you and me. It only takes our “yes”. And the “yes” releases the wild grace of growth, of swelling hope in us, of an intimate relationship with the One who is saving us even as we carry Him. When we have grown full and stretched wide to cradle this light, we open ourselves to its pushing and it spills out of us, a love and a light that brings saving life to all who long for it.
When we agree to become God’s dwelling place, He fills us. We swell inside with hope, with grace, with the message of salvation. His presence grows in us, and he is magnified in us. We grow so full with Him that we cannot contain it within ourselves any more, and we labor with the burden of love. Life is born of His presence within us and it begs for release. So we give ourselves over to it and we allow it to be released into this wild, wide world, desperate for its cries of freedom.
Oh, the wild glory grace of it all! We are the women who follow in the footsteps of Woman, who by her example can live overshadowed by God, be His dwelling places, and bear Christ, He who is our salvation and light, both inside ourselves in intimate sacredness and out into the world in the laboring act of faith.
This is who we are, we women. All of us, made of the same model of she whom Jesus called “Woman”. The woman who was both His creation and His mother. We are her sisters and her daughters. And we too are dwelling places of the Most High God. Have you given Him permission to dwell in you? Are you ready to do so? It only requires your quiet “yes.” Can you feel us all, your sisters, whispering it with you, standing by your side under His shadow, pregnant with the hope of salvation? Let us labor together to offer it to the waiting world.