It really was quite
the ugly cliché.
But I meant it with
everything I had.
A friend had asked
the procedural question, asked how I was. And when the cliché eked into my
response, he eyed me with a skepticism that shot holes into every syllable. I,
of course, knew how unsatisfactory the words were. Because if there's anything
that makes me curdle inside, it's the misappropriation of a phrase. Words
otherwise dated correctly can spoil as soon as they leave your mouth.
But I truly meant
all of it.
I had no earthly
idea how I was doing, but had every certain idea in heaven and earth
that my Precious Jesus is good.
So I said it.
Words hollowed from
excessive use sometimes prove themselves hallowed spaces to cradle inside. And
Christ comes into the emptiness of things we may not yet understand, birthing a
holy cry in the middle of our holes.
Let me be the first
to open up that second box of clichés a little more. Because coming into
Christmas this year, I felt saturated with holes, leaking long before Advent
lit its first candle. I joked with my
Mama on Christmas Eve that surely I was a miserly sore thumb amidst our
overwhelmingly generous family, bringing nothing but open hands.
It's not even that
Christmas "snuck" up this year like Santa tiptoeing his way through
every jaunty holiday rhyme. Practically speaking, tornadoes preceded the
celebration week, so I'd call that a less than subtle entry. Personally
speaking, I'd anticipated the arrival with preparations that excited with full
joy.
All the same, I
wondered if you might've felt it, too.
How heaviness might have labored your journey
to the manger a little more this year? How full joy actually just leaked from
every pore in your vessel because you were more porous than you realized? That
you were actually completely hollowed out save for the Treasure inside?
My own holes widened
when new friends I'd met came laboring up cold train tracks from their nylon
home, carrying weeks worth of laundry. I'd just told my friend that "Jesus
is good" and here I am taking my friends to what home, now? Leaving them
in what kind of weather?
The holes furthered when, the next day, my car
met its limit on the highway, and in five cars confused together, the Lord
lavished grace and Life. No one beside me in the passenger seat. No one riding
in the back. Nothing completely broken except for a split jar of a heart with
spilt words of praise.
Then, two days
later, the view of a man composing a song for his father, a saint taken
suddenly. A memorial offered up just days before Christ's birth is
commemorated. This son, he brought sacrifice to His King simply by standing.
But then he went so far as to play before Him.
This familiar
Scripture stretched across the screen toward the end of the memorial. The song
had been offered. Hallowed Hope offered, anew, here:
"Then
Jesus, again groaning in Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone
lay against it. Jesus said, 'Take away the stone.' Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to Him,
'Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.' Jesus
said to her, 'Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the
glory of God?'" (Jn. 11:38-40)
Were the ending not
enough- a man dead four days brought fully to life, again- the beginning
is even more.
Jesus CAME to the
tomb.
He walked straight
to the greatest representation of emptiness on earth just as He had curled
Himself as the Word made flesh within a mother's womb.
His very Incarnation
terrorized Death, even before its looming defeat by way of the Resurrection.
Death shuddered because He dared plunge
straight into the emptiness. Walked right to our tombs.
Your body might not
feel Life headed towards you in your funeral clothes when you're sealed up like a sarcophagus shell, but oh, when that stone comes away...the pupils of your dead heart dilate
wide in astonished belief and you truly see His Glory.
Because you see Him
in His goodness, Him aching that you'd live.
All of a sudden, a
former cave, the dreariest of empty crevices, fills up with substantial GLORY.
You become a vessel
"filled with all the fullness of God" when you are direly empty (Eph. 4:19).
Even with your holes
spewing grief and hurt and longing and tiredness
Only three holes He
sees and
Hope has no holes
save for those
that have saved you.
He is. So. Good.
And you know
something really lovely? On Christmas Eve this year, the moon from this corner
of the world was a defiant, clear half of itself. It shone like the cupped palm
of a cradle.
Empty save for the
Sun.
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