“Blessed Are You Who Believed”: Surrendering Our Plans to God
“Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
Advent 2021: Responding to God’s Call and Growing in Community
This Advent, our leadership and writing teams are reflecting on the Visitation—Mary’s visit to St. Elizabeth while they were pregnant with Jesus and St. John the Baptist. Click here to read more.
When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her she was going to bear a son, Mary wasn’t just surprised because she was a virgin. She was also surprised because she had planned to always be a virgin.
Catholic tradition teaches that Mary was planning on living a life of perpetual virginity, dedicated to serving God, with St. Joseph as the protector of that life. She was never going to have children but would devote herself to God instead. It would have been a good life, a holy life.
So, imagine Mary’s surprise when Gabriel told her she was going to be a mother. It’s not like God was taking her from a path of sin to a path of virtue; she was already leading a virtuous life and had a holy plan for her life. God was asking her to change it for a better one. She would remain a virgin, but she would also be a mother.
How often do we experience a call to leave something good behind for something better? Perhaps your boyfriend breaks up with you, and then you meet and marry the love of your life a few years later. Perhaps you lose the job you enjoy, and then you find one that gives you purpose you never had before. Perhaps you must leave your hometown when your husband gets a new job out of state, and then you develop beautiful friendships with your new neighbors.
In “Reed of God,” her book about Mary, Caryll Houselander points out that “it’s not only trivialities” that keep us from being receptive to God: “Very often, serious people with a conscious purpose in life destroy it by being too set on this purpose … They have a plan, for example, for reconstructing Europe, for reforming education, for converting the world; and this plan, this enthusiasm, has become so important in their minds that there is neither room to receive God nor silence to hear His voice.” If we are too attached to the life we have planned for ourselves, it can keep us from hearing his voice, which may tell us that we need to change course.
The saints’ lives are filled with examples of God changing their best-laid plans for something better. Saints Zélie and Louis Martin, parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, each felt drawn to religious life and disappointed when they were turned away—only to eventually become devoted to each other and their family (and raise a doctor of the Church). St. Elizabeth of the Trinity gave up music (she was a gifted pianist) to become a cloistered Carmelite nun. St. Anna the prophetess was widowed early in her marriage but spent her life worshiping God and, at the end of her life, met his Son when Mary and Joseph came to present him at the temple (Luke 2:36-40). And, of course, we have no better example of surrender to God’s will than in our Mother, queen of all saints, and her fiat.
What can we learn from Mary when God changes our plans? Here are three things Mary did that we can, with God’s grace, do, too:
1. Mary Said Yes
First and foremost, Mary said “yes” to God. This “fiat” (meaning “let it be done” in Latin) showed tremendous trust and surrender, a foreshadowing of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Gabriel asked Mary to become the mother of Jesus; he didn’t inform her it was going to happen whether she wanted it to or not. She could have said, “No.”
God gave us free will, which means we have the choice to cooperate with his grace. We have the choice to pray to align our will with his—which is a lot harder when it comes to big decisions that may require us to give up something we greatly desire.
Mary took on a lot with her fiat—the possibility of scandal, the challenges of raising a baby in Nazareth, the unknown sacrifices and suffering that would come with being the mother of the Savior. She may not have known everything that would happen to her and her family, but she probably knew it would be a long and difficult road. And still, she remained “the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38). Still, she said yes.
2. Mary Served
St. Luke tells us that after becoming pregnant with Jesus, Mary traveled “in haste” to visit her cousin Elizabeth, whom Gabriel had told her was pregnant “in her old age.” In other words, Mary’s first action after becoming the Mother of God was to take a difficult journey to serve someone else.
This response must have been habit for Mary; as a mother, I can tell you that for a woman to take such a journey during early pregnancy in order to help someone else, she must have been accustomed to thinking of others first. Just as Mary was open to hearing God’s will and aligning her own will with it, she was open to his prompting to visit Elizabeth and help her at the end of her pregnancy.
In a retreat created for her sister, a wife and mother, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity writes that “the attitude of the Virgin during the months that elapsed between the Annunciation and the Nativity is the model for interior souls, those whom God has chosen to live within.” She describes Mary as an interior soul who, nevertheless, “spent her life in the world, not only in prayer but in serving her family and her neighbors,” as Claire Dwyer writes in her book “This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey With St. Elizabeth of the Trinity,” Dwyer continues, “Mary’s prayer and recollection did not prevent her from dropping everything and hurrying to her expectant cousin but rather compelled her to do so; they urged her onward to greater and greater love, loving not just God but everything good and beautiful and true that He created. Prayer and action, in perfect union: this, I like to think, was her seamless garment.”
3. Mary Glorified God
When I’ve been disappointed in the forks God has placed in my own path, my natural reaction has not been to praise him. Yet, in the Magnificat, that’s exactly what Mary did: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior” (Luke 1:46-47).
How often do you glorify God? Do you seek him in adoration? Find him at daily Mass? Pray with the Psalms? Sing hymns or praise songs? Begin a prayer with praise rather than immediately going to a petition? I don’t do any of these things nearly enough (although I have started diving into the Psalms more frequently and highly recommend regular reading of this beautiful book of the Bible). I tend to pray when I need help or when I need to thank God for something he gave me, not to simply “bless the Lord” and “his holy name” (Psalm 103:1). If I only think God is great when his will happens to align with mine, how strong is my faith? It’s in trusting him when he says “no” to something I want (even, or especially, when that something is a good something) that true faith lies.
Dwyer writes that “a different kind of fruit comes from setting something aside for a greater vocation … God is glorified in our willingness to lay down even His own gifts at His feet.” What’s more, “we know well that God will never take anything away without giving a new gift.” We can see this truth vividly in Our Lady’s life; God gave her a unique devotion to him that would have been well served as a consecrated, childless woman—but she bore the greatest fruit of all by becoming the mother of God, fully consecrating herself to the Lord by bearing his Son.
Taryn Oesch DeLong is a wife and mother in Raleigh, NC. In between changing diapers, reading stories, and singing lullabies, she is also a freelance editor and writer. Passionate about supporting women in work, in life, and in health, she is the managing editor of Catholic Women in Business; a contributor at Natural Womanhood, CatholicMom.com, and Live Today Well Co.; and a fertility awareness advocate and FEMM instructor. In her free time, Taryn enjoys relaxing with a cup of Earl Grey and a Jane Austen novel. She also volunteers with the pro-life ministry at her parish and plays the piano and the flute. Taryn’s favorite saints are Sts. Joseph, Zélie, Thérèse, Teresa of Calcutta, and Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein). Follow Taryn on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or read her blog, Everyday Roses.