March 25 marks the date that the Catholic Church and many other Christians commemorate the Annunciation of Mary. This is when we recognize the momentous moment Mary accepted the invitation from the angel Gabriel to become the mother of God. Through the “yes” of a teenage girl in the backwaters of Galilee 2,000 years ago, God became one of us and saved us from ourselves.
As we look around at our broken world, even the non-religious can see that things are not as they should be. God used Mary to begin rebuilding his kingdom here on earth, and so we can confidently look to her example in how we can begin repairing the brokenness permeating our culture today.
1. God Uses the Simple and Seemingly Insignificant
Some might say a girl like Mary from so long ago in a place like Galilee is irrelevant. In order to fix American society, we need further advances in technology and people in power who know what they are doing. The solution, however, is much more simple.
What we need is to recover the original blueprint for the human person. This blueprint is found in Mary. Yes, the teenager from the Middle East who lived two millennia ago is the model for the revival of the future. In fact, her apparent irrelevance today would not have been much different from her seemingly unimportant life in her own time. That is how God works: he uses the seemingly insignificant to change the world.
