Slow day on call in the NICU today…had a great Christmas yesterday because the hospitalist decided I was a redundancy, and after rounds were finished and orders entered, she let me go home!  Got to take a mid-morning nap, then visit the Onoratos and the Ips back in Sudbury, eat tons of cookies and ham, then back home to open presents with Joe and fall asleep by 8 pm under a pile of awesome blankets: my baby blanket, newly discovered back at my parents house, my JMP blanket, courtesy of a friend’s mom, and a fuzzy fleece blanket I ordered online. 

Did you know you can read the Bible online?  Not that I’m particularly religious, but I figured I eat the Christmas cookies and open up the Christmas presents, and Christ was born on 12/25, so I figured I should dig around and read about his birth.  And it’s a wacky story.  In almost as many words: an angel came to visit teenage Mary, who wasn’t even married yet, and told her “congratulations! The Lord is going to immaculately knock you up.” And she was suspicious.  Then the angel gave her some more details, and then she was like, “Okay, I’m down with that.”  What if she had said no?  Did she have a lot of time to decide? I mean, did this news come in a 15 minute conversation or did she have days to mull it over before agreeing?  And did she know any better?  She was a teenager!  Her response to the angel implies a choice, but the details are super sketchy, both in the King James version and in the New International version. 

The whole story has left me feeling very uneasy because I want Mary to have had choice in this whole matter, even if it was the choice to carry out a pregnancy in full.  It would have been nicer if she had visited her cousin Elizabeth, been able to discuss the issue with her, seen her give birth to John, and been like, “yeah, alright, this ain’t so bad, I’m okay with it, so yo, angel, you can tell God I’m down with the immaculate conception.”

Do you see the dilemma? I am going back to the conference room to worry about it and eat more cookies.