Since Christmas falls on Thursday this year, I’m sending this week’s middle-of-the-week post a couple of days early. It’s been an unusually busy Advent this far, and I was wondering what I would send out this week as I walked Bovina yesterday morning, a time when I usually listen to one of my favorite podcasts.
Yesterday morning it was the latest entry in Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens.” She’s been providing short Advent meditations. Her final one of this Advent was so good that I wanted you to read it. A Merry Christmas to everyone–here’s Kate:
OK, so by this point in December, love has been merchandised within an inch of its life. It jingles in every commercial that insisted if you really love someone, you’ll prove it with a huge luxury car with a bow the size of a house. Sure, that’s one kind of love. And if you have the means for that kind of love, my address is . . . Just joking.
But Advent tells another story, God didn’t arrive in a grand gesture. No skywriting, no fireworks, no leather interior with heated seats. Love slipped into a Bethlehem stable, swaddled in rags. So this is not the love we usually want. We’d prefer something with a little more sparkle, maybe a little more certainty.
Instead, God gives us a love that chooses vulnerability. A baby that can’t hold up his enormous newborn head. A teenage mom trying not to fall apart. A dad wishpering, “Please, Lord, let this not be a terrible mistake. And yet this is the love that remakes the whole world. Not quick or efficient, but slow and human. Love that needs to be changed and fed and rocked back to sleep. Love that will grow up to sit down with anyone, to weep at gravesides, and promise that nothing, not even death, can seperate us from the heart of God.
So here we are, a few days from Christmas, standing on the edge of the story that we’ve been waiting for, and maybe now is a good time to find that invitation of love everywhere you look. Wouldn’t that be nice if we just right now committed to feeling like there is a conspiracy of love in every text that says “made it home safe”? In a neighbor who clears your walkway or maybe you go clear theirs, and a friend who remembers to check in, in that one delicious cookie that the lady from church gave you. Even when the world is spinning too fast, let’s find every glimmer of love. Love in the God who came close, unnoticed but never unneeded.
So blessed are we who believe in love, no matter how small, and that it is enough to remake the world. Where are you noticing love? Where has it come up this season already in maybe small, almost ordinary ways?
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