Has there ever been a moment in your life when you would have bet every last dime you had only to discover that if you had, you’d be broke? That happened to me last summer during a two-week school intensive when my cohort served dinner to the “down and out” at a church’s soup kitchen in Hollywood. An elderly man, dressed in clothes from the 80s, dropped in for dinner and began a conversation with me. Not long into the exchange, he told me he was an “American Success Story” because many years ago he had moved here from Sweden dirt poor but now he owned two large apartment complexes in Santa Monica as well as a handful of restaurant chains! I immediately thought he was crazy and that his were the ramblings of a very sad man living in a delusional world. If he was the “American Success Story” he claimed to be, why would he choose to eat at a church’s soup kitchen in a slummy part of Hollywood? (This is the part of the story where I would have bet every dime I had that this man didn’t have a dime to his name to bet against me).
After our conversation, the pastor of the church approached me and said, “The guy you were just talking with is a multi-millionaire.… He eats with us because he just likes our company.” (This is the part of the story were had I bet every dime I owned, I’d be getting in line for dinner). This little encounter reminds me how easy it is to get swept away by things that are seen while missing a much bigger reality in what is unseen.
As we quickly approach Christmas, I have been thinking a lot about the incarnation of Christ (the miracle of God the Son clothing himself in flesh and bones to be with us). I wonder how easy it was for the people Jesus grew up with to miss that he really was the Son of God. Think about it: We get the privilege of hindsight and the omission of day-to-day details, but they saw him in all of his ordinariness. They saw him as a child spin in circles until he fell just to feel the rush of being dizzy (I assume that Jesus did this because it seems that spinning in circles is pretty much a universal childhood thing!). They saw Jesus go through puberty: zits, voice cracks, and all. They saw Jesus learn how to swing a hammer with his stepfather Joseph. They, like you and I, saw the all-too-easy-to-see external realities and never knew that the Son of God was growing up right under their noses. He hid his glory in flesh and bones and met them—and us—in our poverty just to be with us because he likes our company so much.
I imagine that you, like me and the rest of humanity, struggle with seeing beyond the external. So, it is my challenge to all who struggle this Christmas to sink deeply into the reality of the incarnation. Perhaps it is among the ordinary where we will find beauty. Maybe . . . as we long for blessing must we step back and see that we are already blessed? Could it be that once we start to look we will see that God truly is with us, even in places unimagined? I hope so.
Just a thought,
Jason