Without Christ there is no Christmas. This is cliched but nevertheless true. However, these few days it was Mary I was meditating on. Without Mary, Christmas is an orphan. We owe the birth of our Saviour to a young teen girl who trusted God and said “Yes, let it be done to me as you want.” We owe a debt of gratitude to Mary for her simple child-like faith. Wisdom does not reside with the old and experienced. It resides with simple faith. A girl fresh from puberty played a vital role and her womb was the landing ground of the Saviour of the whole world. Most cultures look upon women as inferior, and they are not treated as equals and deserving of mutual respect. They are taken advantage of and patronized or ignored. Their talents, influence and gifts are not always fully appreciated nor valued. Worse they are also violated and oppressed and are objects of sarcasm, suspicion and cynicism. They are not taken seriously – unless they happen to be your mother. However, what man despises, God exalts. He did that 2000 years ago when He chose Mary – a teen girl to reveal the “arm of the Lord”, “a light to the peoples”. So do not forget Mary. Thank God for Mary and all the goodness she represents as a woman, as a believing Eve–faith, sacrifice, risk, tenderness, gratitude, gentleness, compassion, talent, strength, and resilience. It was David Yonggi Cho of Full Gospel Church, Yoido, who echoed William Booth of the Salvation Army, who declared, “My best men are women”. So today, thank God for all women and show your sincere appreciation when you wish your mother, your wife, girlfriend and daughter and sister a Mary Christmas.
Jenni Ho-Huan, in her interesting book, When God Shapes a W.I.F.E.(Armour Publishers), exhorted women to embrace their femininity instead of allowing society to berate her for it. This specialness about females includes: “emotionality”, the desire to bless, and intuition.
“Women have an incredible ability to detect a wide range of stimuli and arrange, file, stack and organize the data we gather. This makes us appear more ‘emotional’ as we respond to multiple stimuli at one time. Our ‘emotionality’, contrary to caricature, is not our weakness but our strength. It allows us to multitask, empathise, and create. This is our gift to humankind. Without a woman’s head and heart for bargains, relational strength, conflict detection, timetable organization and more, what kind of world would we be living in? Women managers who embrace their femininity make wonderful leaders and bosses because they pick up cues that go beyond the Powerpoint presentation, and bother to send a bouquet to a sick employee”(Jenni Ho-Huan, 2011, 29).
The woman’s desire to bless is evident to all and does not need further elaboration. Who hasn’t heard of Mother Theresa or Florence Nightingale and others like them? Intuition is also a quality women have that is not often appreciated. It can be called the sixth sense, or gut feel. It is often misread by men. “Our sharing makes us vulnerable and we get called names like ‘overactive imagination’, ‘controlling’, ‘nagging’ and busybody’”(Jenni Ho-Huan, 2011,31).
Jenni’s encouraging and affirmative word to women is: embrace your femininity, and let God use it to complete what is lacking in this man-world. Incidentally, as I was reading chapter one of this book, there was this young lady candidate like a lone voice in the wilderness crying out for the urgent need to look after Singapore’s elderly poor. She is an NSP candidate and part of a GRC team contesting against the incumbent Senior Minister’s ward of Marine Parade GRC. She seemed to have embraced 
her femininity (and I hope it does not get eroded along her political journey of championing justice). She has ’emotionality’, the desire to bless and intuition. Watch this video on razor.tv titled Fresh-faced Nicole Seah generates buzz . You will be encouraged by the forthrightness, intelligence and courage in one only 24. She deserves our respect and support.
Postscript: Noticed lots of inquiry about her faith. A friend has told me the family attended Bethesda Bedok Tampines, and then Faith Community Baptist Church, and also the New Creation Church. Current status unknown.