Each of the four Sundays of Advent remind us of those who prepared for the coming of Christ. Today we think of the Virgin Mary, who bore Him in her womb and because of the Roman order, had to travel in her 3rd timester of pregnancy on a donkey. Mary who would not have her mother or women she knew there helping when she gave birth for the first time.

Mary, a young girl, who knowing that it could mean her death to be pregnant before marriage, quietly fully accepted the will of God for her life. It must have been a frightening idea, yet wonderfully she put her entire trust in God's ability to both do as the angel had foretold and to protect her life in the process. She needed that trust on the road to Bethlehem. Can we trust God enough to surrender to His will the way Mary did?

O Antiphon - O rex gentium (O King of the Nations)

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." - Isaiah 2:4

"But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. - Isaiah 64:8