You Are Mine

Leonard Sweet, from his book Strong in the Broken Places, shares a story called the Whisper Test.  

We all know that the world can be a cruel place, but it can be brutal to people who suffer from congenital disabilities. Mary Ann Bird was one of those people who suffered the vicious attacks of other children in school. Mary Ann had plenty of things for children to make fun of her: she was deaf in one ear, had a cleft palate, and a disfigured face. The physical impairments paled compared to the emotional damage she endured. When asked by mocking voices, “What happened to your lip?” Mary Ann would reply, “I cut it.”

What Mary Ann dreaded more than anything at school was the annual hearing test. Each student went to the teacher’s desk where the child would cover one ear and then the other. The teacher would whisper a line like, “the sky is blue” or “what lovely shoes you have.” If the teacher’s phrase was heard and repeated, the child passed the test. 

The only way Mary Ann could pass the test was to cheat and thus avoid the humiliation of failing the whisper test. She would cup her hand over her good ear so that she could still hear what the teacher said. One year Mary Ann had Miss Leonard as her teacher, a teacher that students dearly loved. On the day of the hearing test, when Mary Ann was called to the teacher’s desk, she was full of anxiety.

Mary Ann cupped her hand over her good ear and waited for the teacher’s sentence. “I waited for those words,” Mary Ann later wrote, “which God must have put into her mouth, those seven words which changed my life.”  Miss Leonard did not say, “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” What she whispered was, “I wish you were my little girl.”  Mary Ann went on to become a teacher herself, a person of inner beauty and great kindness.

When God sent his son as a babe to be born in Bethlehem, God was whispering to each of us, “You are mine!” You may not know it, but God wants you to know that you are his and he sent Jesus to be one of us—to give us that message. Nothing changes our lives as much as knowing we are loved and that we belong. Christmas says to the world, “You are mine, and you belong to me.”