Love Came Down

It's a few days before Christmas and here I am trying to ponder if I can even understand how to celebrate it this year.  So many changes.  So many things unfolding.  

And the only thing I can be right now is vulnerable.  For it is the only way I'll be able to understand the purpose of the season.  

When you yield a part of your life to God, it doesn't automatically become smooth sailing as you thought it would be.  A large part of it will continue to be a huge interior debate whether or not you did the right thing.  Another part of it will be testing the limits of what you know to be your self-worth.  Some of the people around you will affirm you and some will frown upon your decisions.  These reactions from other people shake the ground you walk on and unending barrage of questions ensue. 

Peace becomes elusive and the only way to keep it is to let your gaze be upon the cross of the Savior who promises that nothing will separate you from His love.  This Love that casts out all fear and soothes the aching places where whispers of unfounded conclusions of your performance crawl beneath. 

Your own corner of the world  is a place filled with constant assessment, judgment, and review of how you fair compared to the rest.  It's always this battle of wits, will and endurance.  Like a rat race that never finishes.  Like a game that needs to be won over and over again.  And it becomes exhausting because the meaning of life revolves around you having to fight to win and if you lose, you have to fight to get back up and try again.  

The ways of living in this world are not graceful by default.

How can life be a gift when you are always fighting to keep it from being stolen from your grasp?  How can life be abundant when you are always fighting to fill the places where you have been robbed off its vitality and zest?  

I ask these hard questions tonight because the promise was HOPE.  A future filled with it.  God spoke to Jeremiah and people always cling to those words of long ago when things in our lives become a little bit uncertain.  

I'm not sure I can completely declare that with the right amount of fortitude tonight.  Tonight I'm just letting myself be exhausted because for the past few years I felt that I didn't have the right to be.  And I suppose that's how one comes into wrapping their mind around that promise of HOPE.  It is when you acknowledge that you are being robbed  off it that you become desperate for what redeems you in that moment.

Emmanuel.  God came down.  Love came down.  

Our redemption didn't just come in Calvary.  It began in  Bethlehem.  The life of this babe-king wrapped in an obscure package we would not even recognize it in this modern age as a gift.  

But those who are desperate for redemption are given the choice to behold the miracle of that cold night and be among those first witnesses of the Story of Grace.