Sunday, December 24, 2017

Contentment in the Absence of Perfection

Merry Christmas Eve!  As has become tradition over the last 5 years since I've been blogging, it's time for my annual Christmas post.  As 2017 comes to an end, I'm feeling a bit disjointed.  Whereas last year we were still in a pretty thick fog after the loss of our sweet Bernice and Jonathan and I were doing our best to shore up our best friends as they prepared to lose their mother mere days after the holiday season passed, this year I think we both feel a bit of unrest.  A lack of "settle".  Life feels a bit like an amazing nearly finished puzzle you've worked on for weeks, that is frustratingly missing a chunk right smack in the middle.  Only we've been working on our "puzzle" for several YEARS...

So that feeling of "unfinished business" that we can't quite put behind us yet has spelled a bit of frustration.  We find ourselves striving for goals we know are reasonable and achievable, but they feel just out of reach at the moment.  And when I can't wrap it all in a bow and call it "finished", man does that mess with my psyche!  If it doesn't look like that perfectly perfect picture I have in my head, I come dangerously close to loosing my marbles.  That striving for and failing to obtain perfection is a cycle I find myself in more frequently than I'd like to admit...

So this Christmas season, I have had to work really, really hard at slowing down and savoring...letting go of my need for perfection.  I've had to remind myself that perfection is not the ultimate goal.  Contentment is.  And I think the picture in Bethlehem that God paints for us is the perfect reminder of that.  Many times I think the HUMANITY of the Christmas story gets lost in the shuffle.  We sing about baby Jesus and how he never cried.  We see paintings of Mary with a literal glowing halo around her head.  We set up nativity scenes depicting this angelic setting with pure white lambs and donkeys that look as though they've just come from the groomer.  We sing about how Jesus was unblemished...the perfect spotless Lamb.  And don't get me wrong...He was.  He IS!  But He was human...

He "took on flesh".  In my mind, that means He, in His perfect plan to save all of His own creation, stepped DOWN from Heaven and lived like we do.  He was the spotless Lamb...He lived a sinless life.  But y'all...he was fully human.  Mary gave birth to that baby just the same way mothers around the world give birth to babies every day.  She felt those searing pains, and she LABORED to bring Jesus into this world.  When He arrived, he was far from "spotless" I'm sure.  He took on flesh and all that entails.  Birth is messy...so was His.  And those little white lambs?  I'm sure they were not so much white as they were covered in mud and stinking to high heaven wondering why in the world this little family from Nazareth was invading their little barn in the middle of the night.  Mary and Joseph had to cut that umbilical cord, they had to clean that little baby off and wrap him in torn cloths to keep him warm.  And Mary rocked him and sang to him and comforted him, because really, that little baby Jesus was as much human as you and I are.  God wanted it that way!  Can you imagine what His experience must have been like?  To step down from HEAVEN into humanity and experience every single bit of it as a human just like us?

God didn't orchestrate this story because He wanted us to experience perfection.  He didn't come to earth as a blemish free angel with a halo around his head.  His mother was a child herself...a weary traveler from an extended family with a sordid past.  God incarnated Himself and came to this earth to give us freedom from the need for perfection.   There was not enough blood on earth to ever cover the sins of this world, and God couldn't bear the thought of our striving for perfection still not measuring up.  So He wiped out the need for perfection in that little Bethlehem stable by making CONTENTMENT accessible in the absence of perfection.  He made a way for us to connect with HIM in the midst of our imperfections...

So this Christmas season, and as you go forth into the new year, be reminded that God desires contentment from us.  He wants us to stumble through this messy life in all of our fully blemished HUMAN-ness and strive for peace and rest.  In the end, that perfect peace and rest is our reward in Heaven.  In the meantime, taking time to remember why we are even here at all is incredibly important.  It's how we keep things in perspective.  That's as much a message to myself as it is to anyone else!  God stepped down from Heaven to be near to us.  He took on flesh to identify with us.  He lived His life blame free to make a way for us.  And He died a criminal's death to atone for us.  So in the depths of your striving for ultimate perfection (depths I find myself in frequently), be reminded that perfection is not attainable here on this earth.  What is attainable?  Contentment.  May that be your gift this Christmas and always...

Merry Christmas!
Rach




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