From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I knew: the only way out of this is death. Either this life inside me disappears without my consent, or I lay my own life down to line the road for another. Like palm leaves at the city entrance, allowing the King to walk through.

An early mantra that popped into my head, whether from my own experiences or a word from the Spirit, was “all life is the Lord’s.” A few weeks after finding out I was pregnant, my cousin died unexpectedly. I sat two rows behind my aunt and uncle at his funeral, hearing how they had gently ushered their son out of this life at only thirty-seven. All life is the Lord’s – from birth to death, and in between. May it be so.

It’s funny, though, how quickly the instinct to protect can hit you. I felt the pangs of panic as I started to realize I could welcome a baby in nine short months, or I could wake up tomorrow cramping and bleeding. I could head to my twenty week ultrasound and find that this baby won’t survive to its birth, or I could plan a funeral for a five-year-old, nine-year-old, thirty-three-year-old. I could hold their hand in sixty years while I say my own goodbye, never knowing what it was like to lose my own child. The point is, however deeply I feel the need to white-knuckle life, it isn’t my choice.

The rallying cry of “my body, my choice” falls a little flat when you hear Jesus’s version – “my body…given for you.” How powerful and beautiful and completely absurd to choose your own death over someone else’s – to see that your life may be worth much, but how much more would it be worth if given up for the sake of someone else. The only true choice that I have is to give myself up for someone else, or not. In God’s kingdom, everything is upside-down – an emptier life is a fuller life. Gentleness is strength. In surrender there is freedom. In death, life.

I have known my whole life that being a mother meant giving it all up. In morning prayer growing up, we sang the Magnificat nearly every day. They are still some of the words that come the easiest to me. I have spent a lot of time over the years taking care of children, and each of them have heard me sing it. But when I sang it early on a Sunday morning standing in my kitchen at four weeks pregnant, it meant something different than it had before. I am your servant, Lord. All life is yours. Mary’s acknowledgement that she is God’s servant didn’t end with giving up her body to be the vessel through which Christ entered the world. She stands at the cross, ushers him back out of this life. From birth to death, and in between.

Giving it all up isn’t something that most mothers celebrate anymore. If anything, it’s practically seen as a product of the patriarchy that women are expected to bear children at all. We do all that we can to make it comfortable, to mitigate the symptoms, from smaller things like “mommy wine culture” to the bigger, more grotesque things like outsourcing childbearing through surrogacy without any medical need for it. You expect me to give up this body I worked so hard for? You expect me to go through pregnancy and birth, put my career on hold for maternity leave?

In the annunciation of Mary, Gabriel greets Mary by calling her “highly favored.” She isn’t the victim of some misogynistic higher power who expects her to birth the true King just because she’s a woman with the right reproductive parts for it. She’s given a gift – an opportunity to give herself up, to follow after God in faith, before she even knows the rest of the story. Motherhood is a radical, fiercely hardcore avenue through which we hold onto some of the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith. There is no greater joy than to suffer with Christ, and Mary discovers this long before anyone else.

What a gift it is to be chosen to follow after Christ in the way that only a woman can. To give up my body, bleeding, broken, nauseous and fatigued, that life may go on. What a gift to have no choice, but to know that the Chooser has knit my life together for his purpose, and he knits new life in me to continue that purpose. What a gift to give myself up.

Now I am thirteen weeks. Being pregnant during Advent is a privilege I am savoring. We last heard the heartbeat on Thanksgiving, and now each day just feels like another hurdle to get over until the next time. Someday, maybe, the anxiety will ease, but more likely I will find that Christ meets me in each moment—each heartbeat, kick, contraction, from birth to death and in between, highly favored to continue the work of faith.

MargaretAnn Hester writes from Knoxville, Tennessee.