The next time we got together, she was leaning in close over Jana. “I can feel her breathe”. Inhaling deeply she said, “She has smelled the same for 16 years”. Later, rummaging through her purse again, she pulled out a single photograph, “This is her prom picture last year. No one asked her to go, so she just took herself. I made her dress. Isn’t she radiant?” …a snapshot in sharp contrast to the mustard-color girl in a coma now, for 5 days.

The last visit I made to this family, Mrs. Thompson, the grandmother, who is deaf and Jana were all gathered in the hospital room, surrounded by festive balloons, hand picked flowers and suitcases lying wide-mouth opened on the floor. Jana, ready to be wheeled to the family car, was sitting in her hospital chariot. She had received a liver-transplant literally moments before her death. “Jana, you look great”. “Doesn’t she”, her Mom blurted in. Jana’s grandmother was wildly waving around a piece of paper. Jana signed to her grandmother while saying out loud, “Let me tell her”. With a 16-year-old giggle, she proclaimed, “I’ve been accepted to Duke— pre-med, full scholarship and when I’m done, back to the mountains to bring healing to all my people there.”

Science, statistics and logic would have had this family believe that acquiring a new liver within moments of death, were the ravings of distraught, poor, mountain women from the south. Their hearts, however, led them to Jana’s bedside every day, believing.

For like Joseph, and the Thompson’s, these are hard times for believing and hard times to pursue the right thing and during hard times choices appear limited. I hope that we will choose to believe, to believe in God and believing that we can believe in God and hope for doing the right thing, no matter the cost. Believing, so much in a God that loves us, that we’re able to persevere, moving through times of betrayal, health challenges, the muck of recovery programs, tired marriages, demanding vocations, homework that slays and kids who don’t always follow our rules, one faithful step at a time. Believing so much in a God that loves us, that each of us can raise up our courage, raise up our voices, raise up beyond the brutal verbal rhetoric mentored on our TV screens, which filters down to our home and church lives, verbal abuse that leaves a bloody fist-print on our cheeks, and damages our souls.

Rise up just people from among us, who choose to do the right thing. We may acknowledge the "Mystery of the Incarnation," and some if not most of us, one time or another, try to keep it in the abstract, such a mystery that it's best not to think about it too much. But "God with us" is neither practical nor sentimental nor distant. To live in that truth is nothing less than to claim all ground as holy ground, to see the messy work of being human as God's work too, to have our ends and means flipped upside-down and tested. Nothing's obvious, but all is potentially blessed.