The Annunciation; the Feast of Free Will

If you are a Christian of any denomination, the ancestors of your faith followed the belief that a virgin girl of twelve to thirteen years of age, was asked by an angel if she would allow herself to become the mother of the son of God.  A pretty hefty ask of anyone; much less from someone who would be considered a child today but two thousand years ago she would have been viewed as a woman, since she reached what was considered then the age of reason; twelve years of age.

Today Christians worldwide celebrate that special day because her miraculous offspring, by historical accounts, ended up changing the path of mankind forever.  From a solely human perspective, this single decision laid the first stone for man’s relationship to family tree of God.  Without Mary’s consent, Jesus would have not been born and countless prophecies would never have been fulfilled.  That single, yes answer was unquestionably the single most impactful answer ever given by any one person in all of history.  

Think about the ramifications of your person decisions. 

When you make big decisions, do you spend time procrastinating? 

If you make a mistake; you say no when you should have said yes.  Do the negative outcomes haunt you? 

Mary was just a poor girl who lived a righteous life.  She was faithful and tried to live a life reflective of her Jewish beliefs but that can be said us many people, then or today.  What sets her apart from others was the depth of her faith and the belief that by doing God’s will everything would be fine.  

From God’s perspective, He shows us that we are not forced to do anything.  Mary could have said no to the angel.  At the time, she was engaged to be married; she was planning her life, minding her own business.  You could say that God shared His will with her and she accepted His path over her own. 

Do we have enough faith to do that? 

God nudges us many times in our life, showing us the direction that He wants us to go, but we don’t always accept His nudge.  We have our own plans. 

What miracles could we be apart of, if we followed Mary’s example?  

We all have free will, and God respects it completely…He understands; created us to use it.

The rest of this article is compliments of the website, http://www.churchyear.net/.  If you enjoy history, check this out.  

The Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary dates back to at least the 6th century, and is mentioned between AD 530 and 533 in a sermon by Abraham of Ephesus.  It was adopted worldwide through the Trullan Synod (AD 692) that speaks of the Annunciation feast as universally celebrated in the Catholic Church.  

The oldest observance of the day is on March 25, although in Spain the feast was at times celebrated on December 19 to avoid any chance of the date falling during the Lenten season. March 25 is obviously 9 months before Christmas, the birth of Jesus. Scholars are not completely sure whether the date of the Annunciation influenced the date of Christmas, or vice-versa. Before the Church adopted fixed days of celebration, early Christians speculated on the dates of major events in Jesus’ life. Second-century Latin Christians in Rome and North Africa tried to find the day in which Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian (d. AD 225) they had concluded that he died on Friday, March 25, AD 29 (incidentally, this is an impossibility, since March 25 in the year AD 29 was not a Friday). How does the day of Jesus’ death relate to the day of his conception? It comes from the Jewish concept of the “integral age” of the great Jewish prophets. This is the notion that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception. Therefore, if Jesus died on March 25, he was also conceived that day. The pseudo-(John)Chrysostomic work de solstitia et aequinoctia conceptionis et nativitatis nostri Iesu Christi et Iohannis Baptistae accepts the same calculation. St. Augustine mentions it as well. Other ancient Christians believed Jesus was conceived on March 25th for another reason: they believed (based on Jewish calculations of the period) that the creation of the world occurred that day. Thus, it was fitting that the one who makes us new creations was conceived on the day the world was created.

Anthony “Tony” Boquet, the author of “The Bloodline of Wisdom, The Awakening of a Modern Solutionary”

If this is my last post, I want all to know there was only one purpose for all that I have written; to have made a positive difference in the lives of others.