Exactly nine months after December 8, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The planners of the liturgical calendar chose to celebrate Mary's birthday with biological precision. This year since Sept. 8 falls on Sunday, we have the option to anticipate the celebration on Saturday.

The exact date is not important. We do not even know the exact date of Jesus' birthday.

What is important is the way that Mary lived her life as a disciple of God and in response Mother of His Divine Son. What is important for us as well as for Mary is belief in a God who is active and alive in our history.

By experiencing this God as a God of love and communicating daily through prayer, we can find ourselves guided through some very surprising and impossible things -- even experiences of great suffering.

During WWII, a young woman was imprisoned by the Nazis for harboring Jews. During her incarceration, she and the other women in her particular barracks were undignified and humiliated by infestation with horrible body lice. It seemed like just another indignity and affliction to be added to all the other pain and deprivation.

This was the cross that these women were given as a test to be a disciple -- one which relatively few if any of us could tolerate, certainly not without much prayer.

When the war was over and the prisoners liberated they found that these same Nazi soldiers had savagely molested the women in the other barracks. It was out of tremendous fear of contagion that they refused to go into this particular prison cell.

Corrie ten Boom spent the rest of her life preaching the gospel worldwide, offering this testimony, just one of many, that God's love is always near even when we do not see it.