That’s God!

“Did you ever think, That’s God eating my soup?” Max Lucado asks Mary in his book God Came Near.

It’s an awesome question… and not for Mary alone. Although we tend to think of Mary’s experience as unique (she rubbed shoulders with the Creator, the Almighty, the I AM!), it’s our experience, too, as certainly as it was hers. It’s just that He is within as Spirit, and therefore less obvious. He’s easy to overlook, easy to neglect, even easy to conveniently forget…

Yet Jesus told His disciples, just before He left them,“If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23 NIV). And I can say,

That’s God living under my roof.

That’s God watching my television.

That’s God riding in my car.

What’s more, Jesus says to each of us, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20 NIV). In a spiritual sense, then:

That’s God sitting at my heart-table.

That’s God breaking the Word of Life to me.

That’s God feasting with me

Talking with me

Laughing with me.

To be honest, I don’t think I’d want to trade places with Mary. She had Jesus at her table; I have Him in my heart. She fed Him; He feeds me. She watched Him walk off toward Jerusalem; He has come to me to stay. But I do want to share her response to the Christ - to treasure up all these things and ponder them in my heart,

until I begin to see as clearly as if the Christ-child played in my doorway…

That’s God eating my soup.

How Far?

“The journey from heaven to earth is the longest journey anyone has ever taken,” Pastor Rick said in his sermon on Sunday. Have you ever tried to grasp just how far Jesus had to come?

How many miles is it, after all, from the throneroom of heaven to a cave in Bethlehem? From total sovereignty to absolute dependence? From incredible glory to almost complete obscurity? From intimate fellowship with the Father and the Son to the peculiar barriers of flesh - an infant mind that cannot even comprehend its surroundings, eyes that cannot focus, lips that cannot yet form words?

How long is the journey from unending perfection to the decay of this sordid earth? From dazzling light and splendor to a globe that spends half its time in darkness? From complete wholeness and sufficiency to poverty and hunger? From omnipotent power to weakness and weariness? From myriads of angels in instant attendance to a mom and dad trying their imperfect best to understand the incoherent expressions of their infant Son?

How far, how really, really far, is it from superintending the creation of the universe to taking the form of the created being? From infinite knowledge to the barely conscious mind of an infant? From answering to the Father to taking orders from a carpenter and his wife?

How far did Jesus come, when He allowed Himself to be contracted from the infinite corners of His existence, into a microscopic embryo inside of Mary… utterly oblivious to existence, completely dependent on His Father and those entrusted with His care?

How far He came… for me and you! Truly He “made Himself nothing” for our sakes, joining us here so that we can someday join Him in all that He left. Standing beside the manger this Christmas season, we can only shake our heads in amazement, and whisper the words of the psalmist David,

Surely, You stooped down to make us great.* And we are eternally grateful.

*Psalm 18:35b NIV

A Smile for Eeyore

I hung up my favorite Christmas decoration last week. I’d forgotten about him, so I smiled when I pulled back the tissue paper and there lay Eeyore, hand-stitched onto a cheerful Christmas stocking made by my mom last year.

Are you familiar with Eeyore , the old grey donkey and pal of Winnie-the-Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood? If you are, you might wonder why I said the stocking was cheerful. Poor gloomy Eeyore is stuck on looking on the dark side of things, often mourning what’s been lost (his tail), or forgotten (his birthday). Unlike the irrepressible Tigger, Eeyore’s most exuberant display of excitement is a flat, almost cynical “Hooray. How wonderful.”

Maybe you’re a bouncy free spirit like Tigger, or a fearful soul like Piglet… but of all of A.A. Milne’s characters, I’ve resonated most with Eeyore. By nature – the old, not the new - what an unnecessary weight I carried around. What a sad old heart beat inside. Like him, I often celebrated my blessings while waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But this stocking is cheerful, genuinely cheerful. Eeyore’s ears are droopy as ever, but there’s a festive hat on his head and a genuine smile on his face. And if you follow his gaze, you see the reason for that smile – a little tree topped with a large, bright yellow Christmas star.

Eeyore and I have both found that by looking at the reason for Christmas, and for life, we don’t have to operate by the old nature anymore. We don’t have to exude gloom or cynicism or despair or negativity. The secret lies in what we’re looking at.

If Eeyore ever becomes distracted and decides to trot off my Christmas stocking, he’ll likely trot right back to his old gloomy point of view. The same goes for me, too. So I’d best hold my position, with my eyes fixed on Jesus, convinced that no matter what else is happening in my Hundred Acre Woods, Christmas is to be celebrated… Life is to be celebrated… because of Jesus.

Hooray!

How really, really wonderful!



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