Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

I like to think of it as a celebration of Mary’s YES.

Yes to love, life, and possibility.

Yes to uncertainty and confusion.

Yes to perhaps not always understanding or being understood.

Yes to life as a mix of joy and sadness, suffering and compassion.

This morning I ask myself, how am I living into my yes?

Mary shows us that our yes, freely given and lived into day by day, has the power to change the world.

Or as Pope Francis recently said in an interview about negativity in media: “Today there is a need for a revolution of tenderness in this world that suffers from ‘cardiosclerosis.”

Hardness of hard or tenderness?

You get to choose.