Somehow I managed to go almost the entire month of December without hearing the phrase "War on Christmas" and that makes me happy. Happily hopeful that instead of wasting precious words and time on grand conspiracies about how the liberals are coming to eat our children...that maybe some Christians have found real battles worth fighting.
Not wars of words of ideologies, partisan politics or agendas...but the fight to give water to those who thirst. Living water to quench their physical and spiritual thirsts.
I am a hopeful cynic and realize how much of a contradiction that is.
It can be hard for me to get into a church Christmas spirit not just because of how anachronistic the holiday is...but with how shallow the holiday and how shallow we all can be.
Despite my feelings of guilt whenever I am given something, I don't think it's wrong to give or receive presents...but at the same time I have trouble reconciling all of these millions of dollars being spent on what amounts to a large pile of things that will break, rust and become useless.
All of that money being spent when there are so many people suffering.
I'm not trying to step on the toes of those wanting to be festive or celebrating...but sometimes it's just not enough for me to offer prayers for people starving to death, for junkies dying in the gutters of major cities, for people who have their dignity and human rights stripped of them because of being born in the wrong place and time.
I don't write these words just to try making people feel guilty...but I have these thoughts and feel the need to write them, to maybe connect with other like minded people...that maybe there is something bigger than us that makes life worth living and fighting for. I can't be ashamed of my convictions, how silly it is for me to stand around professing my weakness and how a God that seems to be invisible is the reason I am here at all.
Christmas, this celebration of the ludicrous notion of God coming to earth in the form of man, should not just be a time of rejoicing but a time of sobriety to realize how blessed we are and how that blessing can be taken and given to those with nothing.
I've mostly gotten rid of the hubris that demanded I try to single handedly change the world but instead I can settle for changing the world of a person or several people.
When I stop to think about how insane my faith must sound to those who have never felt the moving of the Holy Spirit, of feeling the weight of sin and guilt removed and being able to start again...I don't even know if it is possible to ever explain it...except by showing it in how I love.
The Gospel feels so impossible, so incredibly out of place and to my knowledge there really is no other faith than Christianity that speaks of God not just loving but chasing after his wayward children. It seems the Lord takes delight in finding "impossible" cases, the social outcasts, the shy, the despised and hated...and using them to be his hands, his feet and a voice of light in this world.
The date, the exact time and location of where Jesus was born doesn't matter, what matters the most is that He is. Somehow, someway, this impossible faith worked its way into my heart and I can safely say that any good, anything worthwhile coming out of me is because of being loved and being made lovable.
That is Christmas, that is faith, that is heaven...impossible, never ending love from a God I do not and will never understand...and I am okay with that.
If I could define or explain God then he would not be God, just another idol or fake Jesus that was invented to make my life easier.
I don't want a God who is a tyrant or a God who refuses to care about sins. I cannot pretend to follow a commercialized Jesus who is nothing more than a wise sage or prophet. It has to be the impossible idea of God coming in the form of man, this absurd and impossible beauty is what I have to follow, have to chase after.
A God that chases me when I have given up and try to run away.
A God who has carried me through all of these chasms, these pains...everything I fear and somehow, someway I am still here.
It's a hope that this meaning of Christmas becomes as real to you as it has to me.
Not just words, not just songs and not even warm and fuzzy feelings.
But the truth that you are never alone, never unloved and that you are beautiful in the way you were made.
"Crawling out from the wreckage of all that I've been taught
I'm leaving it behind
They fling their venom out at me when I resign
Outside the gates I drag myself into a world bigger than I had believed
And inside they flay their sheep lest they follow me and leave
But after everything I've done and everything I do
I can still remember you
Lines in my hands, light through the walls
I'm writing you letters with my prayers
After all that I've stood up falls
And I afford you none of my cares
If I ask you "what is truth" will you be silent still?
My questions and doubts made a chasm
That I fear you can not fill
Perhaps the lens I've eyed you through
Keeps me from knowing what is truth
I can't find what I'm looking for
And I still remember you
When I relent the shackles of all that I've been fed
I pull back the floor and find something beautiful instead
After everything That I've been through
I don't recognize myself anymore
Sometimes I think I might remember
But then I close the door
I walk away from everything and find myself made free
In all the tangles of who I am the truth is that you love me
Just as I was, just as I am, just as I will be
In all the tangles of who I am, the truth is that you love me"
-Showbread, "The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things"
Friday, December 24, 2010
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