From the manger to the cross...

It's beautiful right now in East Tennessee...beginning of March and 75 degrees...I was driving into work this morning and looking back over a hay field at the sunrise and thanking God for the beauty of the day.  I was enjoying listening to music on Pandora, trying to ready my spirit for the day ahead.  This beautiful string quartet piece came on and then another song started and I recognized it as a song we sang for Christmas and one I've written about before.  It was "Be Born in Me."  I was about to go to the next song, when I started listening to the words with new eyes....with Easter eyes.  

"Everything inside me cries for order...if God is pleased with me, why am I so terrified?  Help me see with Heaven's eyes.  And before my head agrees, my heart is on its knees....Holy is he.  Blessed am I."

I started welling up with tears...the realization that Mary ended up needing Jesus as much as Jesus needed her hit me. She, like all of us, had to come to a point in her life when she said, "Lord, I need you to be born in me."  Her son died on that cross for all of us, including his own mother.  And she had to accept that, accept his calling.

Every mother and father goes through this to some degree. The act of letting go so that your child can fully experience life and his or her calling must be one of the hardest things to experience as a parent.  I don't have kids, but I can already see how much my parents sacrificed their own fears and concerns so that I could become who I am.  I am amazed that they handled all of my decisions with such grace.

Another part of the song says, "Did you wrap yourself inside the unexpected, so we might know that love would go that far?"

Think about that from the perspective of the manger, to the way Jesus lived his life, and the way he died.  We didn't expect him to come that way...we didn't believe that he was the Messiah because he hung out with sinners and rode on a donkey instead of a unicorn (that's for you, Grace).  And he died between two criminals and even welcomed one of them into the Kingdom at the last possible minute.  

Jesus is unexpected.  This is true on a daily basis.  Jesus still wraps himself in the unexpected so that we might know that love will indeed go that far.  And don't we begin to understand that in our own lives...in the way we love and are loved?  We need to be loved as much as the person we love needs our love.  God desires our love while we are bankrupt without his love.  

Love travels leaps and bounds if we let it.  God's love wraps us up and allows us to experience the unexpected gift of love in the first cries of a newborn baby, in the understanding look of a friend, in the embrace of shared grief, in the sunrise over a hay field...and so much more.

Journey with me this season of reflection.  And know that you are loved.