Word: Luke (The Lord's Servant)
We all have our awkward teenage years. We feel misunderstood, our bodies are changing... It can be a difficult time. When Mary was 15 years old she was engaged to be married, had been visited by an angel and was a virgin yet somehow pregnant with the son of God. When I was 15 years old I was a nerdy high school freshman, had acne all over my face and was socially awkward. So yeah, I can pretty much relate to her.
Stronger than Old Testament Thugs
Mary has always fascinated me. Like I mentioned above, she's unmarried (but engaged) and pregnant. From what I've heard and read about first century Jewish culture, her husband-to-be, Joseph, has the legal right to have her stoned for that. This is a pretty scary situation for Mary. Yet when an angel tells her she's been chosen to give birth to the Messiah, Mary replies:
I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me according to your word.
Sometimes I lose sight of how courageous that statement was. Seriously, Samson could wipe out thousands of Philistines with a jawbone, but that's nothing compared to what Mary does here. The dream of 2.5 kids, the house in the suburbs with the 3 car garage and Saturday morning book club? Forget it. "According to your word" turns out to mean that she'll be poor, be an outcast judged by her peers and go through the pain of seeing her son suffer a slow and horrible death. She may not have known all that when she said these words, but she knew that her normal life was changing significantly and would not be getting easier.
Her life was interrupted and cut in half (cue the design above)—and she's like, "Sure. I'm God's servant." Wow.
Now who wants some free stuff?
Why should I care about Radiohead?
For those of you who don't know, I'm a huge Radiohead fan. In fact, I like them more than the cheese popcorn at Candyland. Back on Monday, Radiohead announced that their new album would be available on Saturday. Then they ended up releasing the the album today (Friday)—a day early.
I've been so inspired by Radiohead's gift of a new album this week that I want to give away some free Word prints.
Here's how I'll search for entries:
- On Twitter, I'll look for tweets with the hashtag "#FreeWordPrint" and a link to my site. Write your own tweet or feel free to copy and paste this one: Word Designs: The Bible, summarized and designified by @Jim_LePage. http://bit.ly/bEe6U0 #FreeWordPrint
- On my site, I'll look for recent comments (on any post, not just this one).
- I'll set up a search that scans the entire interwebs and looks for any time my name is mentioned in a blog post. (You could also contact me to make sure I see it.)
- There's no great way to search for you folks who have shared on Facebook, so instead I'll scan the recent comments on my site to look for people who mentioned that they shared via Facebook.
Do as many of those things as you want to enter. I don't want to be responsible for your friends and followers getting spammed, so there's no need to do any of those more than once to enter.
On Wednesday, February 23, I'll randomly choose 3 entries and they will each receive a free 16x20 Word print of their choice. (This giveaway is open to folks outside the U.S. as well.)
Good luck!