{"id":14803,"date":"2015-12-28T16:02:06","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T22:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zackhunt.net\/?p=14803"},"modified":"2015-12-28T16:02:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T22:02:06","slug":"changing-diapers-for-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/zackhunt\/2015\/12\/changing-diapers-for-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing Diapers For God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"diapers\"(Credit: Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m often asked what my plans are now that I\u2019m done with graduate school.<\/p>\n

Since \u201cI do a lot of blogging\u201d makes it sound like I moved back into my parents\u2019 basement and \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d sounds even worse, I usually tell people I\u2019m doing doctoral work in the often overlooked fields of diaper changing and bottle making.<\/p>\n

I originally began my doctoral studies by focusing on cloth diapers, but once another \u201ccase study\u201d was added to my program, the course work became too much\u00a0and I transitioned to a\u00a0traditional focus on disposable excrement\u00a0catchers.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t help but think about my studies during the sermon at church yesterday.<\/p>\n

My pastor preached on Luke 2<\/a> and Jesus\u2019 infamous Home Alone<\/em> parody when his parents headed back home only to\u00a0realize they had left the boy Jesus behind in Jerusalem. Then, when they found him, he was\u2026let\u2019s be honest\u2026kind of a smart alec about the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Though I find that whole story fascinating, particularly now that I\u2019m a parent, what stuck out to me yesterday wasn\u2019t the boy Jesus dropping knowledge in the temple.<\/p>\n

It was the silence between his birth and that moment.<\/p>\n

As you know, we don\u2019t have all that much information about Jesus\u2019 childhood.\u00a0Matthew and Luke give us a few\u00a0stories surrounding his birth, but once Jesus is presented at the temple and the magi leave, there\u2019s nothing but silence until he\u2019s left behind (pun maybe intended?) in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

Now, there is the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas<\/a> that attempts to shed some light on Jesus\u2019 childhood and it does find Jesus doing some pretty incredible things like breathing life into clay birds, resurrecting a friend from the dead, and\u2026uh\u2026cursing a boy to death and causing the dead boy\u2019s parents to go blind.<\/p>\n

Fun stuff.<\/p>\n

But, and maybe this is just the parent in me, it\u2019s hard not to think that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was written to spice up an otherwise boring time in the life of Jesus. After all, we can\u2019t allow\u00a0our greatest heroes to suffer even one moment of the mundane. They must constantly be doing awesome and amazing things all the time lest they, I don\u2019t know, shrivel up and waste away? If our heroes aren\u2019t incredible 24\/7, then the unimaginable happens.<\/p>\n

They become ordinary.<\/p>\n

And relatable.<\/p>\n

And that is just totally unacceptable.<\/p>\n

Maybe Jesus did put Harry Potter to shame with his awesome miracle skills when he was a kid, but I would wager a pretty hefty bet that the gospel writers skipped over this period in his life because simply because it was, well, boring.<\/p>\n

At least when compared to the rest of Jesus\u2019 story.<\/p>\n

I mean think about it. After the magi left and angels stopped singing in their backyard, Mary and Joseph had a lot of decidedly less exciting time of their hands, time filled with breastfeeding and diaper changing, losing sleep and washing clothes, failed attempts at getting baby Jesus to stop screaming and complete success at letting their house become a total disaster because cleaning is the last thing you want to do after a night full of 3 hours of restless sleep.<\/p>\n

Now, I know we Protestants get super squeamish about the adoration of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

I get it.<\/p>\n

I really do.<\/p>\n

But if ever there was a woman worthy of our admiration (and there have been many), surely Mary is at the top of the list.<\/p>\n

Raising a child is hard enough on its own. Add to that an ancient patriarchal society in which Joseph was probably MIA doing other things most of the time and then combine with a life of poverty and you\u2019ve got a potent mix that all but guarantees a long string of difficult and stressful days (and nights).<\/p>\n

To various extents, we can all relate to that.<\/p>\n

But Mary wasn\u2019t just any parent.<\/p>\n

She was changing diapers for God.<\/p>\n

Heck, she was changing the diapers of<\/em> God.<\/p>\n

For all parents, the health and well being of our children is dependent upon our care for them. But for Mary, the gospel and even salvation itself was dependent upon her willingness to be a parent, to do mundane, boring, everyday things most of us take for granted. Because without the diaper changes, without the breastfeeding, without the constant care and attention that cost her (and Joseph) untold amounts of sleep, Jesus doesn\u2019t make it through childhood. Without years and years of undocumented, unglamorous work that the gospel writers didn\u2019t think interesting enough to record, Jesus never gets a chance to walk across the sea of Galilee, preach the Sermon on the Mount, feed the five thousand, or carry his cross up the hill of Calvary.<\/p>\n

Changing diapers may be boring work, but without Mary doing that boring work, there is no good news.\u00a0Without the\u00a0mundane moments of Jesus\u2019 childhood, there is no opportunity for greatness down the road.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what I found so profoundly interesting in\u00a0what the gospel writers don\u2019t<\/em> say.<\/p>\n

Changing diapers and washing clothes\u00a0may not make for great story material, at least not the kind that\u2019s primed and ready for\u00a0a made for TV movie, but there\u2019s an incredibly important lesson to be learned in the silence between the departure of the magi and the day Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

His birth and ministry may get all the headlines, but without the time in-between, when Jesus was just another kid and Mary and Joseph were just parents trying to make through another day,\u00a0without those years and years and years of uninteresting everydayness, there is no foundation for the greatness that was to come.<\/p>\n

Those years and their seemingly never-ending monotony may\u00a0not make for epic\u00a0story telling material, but the moments that bookend and depend upon that time serve as an important reminder for all of us that there is something sacred in the messy and the mundane, the ordinary and the everyday.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean every single thing we do is holy and transcendent in importance.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not. There are plenty of everyday things we do that have no significant, life changing ripples.<\/p>\n

But in an era in which we\u2019ve\u00a0convinced ourselves that the world can only be changed through extraordinary deeds worthy of a viral post on Facebook, the silence surrounding Jesus\u2019 childhood should remind all of us of the importance to be found in the mundane.<\/p>\n

Simple acts of ordinary love and kindness may not garner much attention, but sometimes, maybe a lot of times they\u2019re far more important and world changing than we give them credit for.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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