Why There's a Holy Picture Above the Changing Table

I have a pen pal who is a religious sister and likes to send me holy cards. 

She doesn't send me quite as many as she used to. I'm not sure whether she ended up with a glut of them (I imagine this is an occupational hazard with most members of a religious order) that she needed to clear or whether she sources one for each individual letter. Either way, some of them are quite pretty and have made it into the artwork I do. 

My favorite one is the one that now hangs above Bitty Baby's changing table. A serene Mary, dressed as Our Lady of Guadalupe, looks down on a baby Jesus swaddled and tied with a black sash. I ended up mounting it on an unused wooden sign and painting roses around the border. 

I initially did it just to decorate the space, but as I found myself looking at it every time I changed a diaper, it began to be something more. I began to connect what I was doing taking care of my infant daughter to what Mary must have done taking care of Jesus as a baby. 

That's a surprisingly good launch point for thinking about the Incarnation, and the holy, flabbergasting absurdity of the creator of the cosmos becoming a baby who needed to have His diapers changed, and be nursed, and get burped after He nursed.

I mean seriously, you look at the Grand Canyon or a picture from the Hubble space telescope, something that makes you feel tiny. You realize God created it. 

Then you look at the baby in front of you. And realize He was one of those at one point. 

It can be a lot to take in. 

There's a vocational aspect to it too.  It's an interesting thought that every act of mothering Mary did was a prayer, if we understand prayer to be communication with God. And every act of fathering Joseph did was as well. Most of what both of them did was prayer. 

Anyway, that's why I keep that particular picture above the changing table. I never expected that particular corner of the house to become a place of profound meditation, but there it is.