Gift

There’s nothing like being in the midst of holiday traffic to make you consider thoughts of the season.

It’s as I’m driving down a often seasonally-congested road that my mind wanders to what I will be giving different people for Christmas this year.  I’m trying to come up with ideas for things that each person really could use, but also something creative that they may not have thought of needing.  I want it to be practical, but also have a unique flair.  I think about my desire to get just the right gift and suddenly I’m struck by a new thought: 

The ability to give a gift like that requires knowing the person.  

Perhaps, then, our deep desire to give just the right gift, and our excitement over receiving such a gift, exists because it proves that we know and are known.

And, of course.

Should we expect any less from an action reflective of the greatest gift ever given?

We have been given a gift that is practical, yet extravagant; needed, yet undeserved; logical, yet creative beyond what we could imagine; desperately longed for, yet something we didn't think we could request.

God's gift of Himself reveals how intimately He knows us.

The week continues on and I find myself in a place of questioning God’s goodness.  Perhaps it’s all the transition or the time of year, but I wonder anew if I can really trust Him to fulfill all my desires.  I find myself assuming He won’t be faithful.  

And in reading the Christmas story, I’m reminded that just as God’s gift of Jesus reveals that we are known by Him, we can trust Him to give us only what He knows is best in all other areas of life because He’s already given us the best gift of all.

I’m back in my car, on the way to a Christmas Eve service, wearing a dress handed down to me by my friend, and my mind begins to to think on gifts again.  The dress I’m wearing is not just a random dress my friend didn’t want, but a dress we’d considered back in high school as an outfit for our jazz choir.  We’d both found the dress and loved it; she’d purchased it and I hadn’t.  And here I was, six years later, having been given the dress I’d really wanted.

I think on that delay.  

Sometimes God doesn’t fulfill our desires in the way that we think He will.  Sometimes He does.  And sometimes He allows us a time of waiting because he uses that delay to shift our focus from the gift to the Giver.  He teaches us to hold things more loosely and helps us learn to more deeply desire Him as the source of all good things, so that when our desire is fulfilled, we’re drawn to Him rather than it.

Then I find myself at the Christmas Eve service, singing carols alongside my biological family and my church family and thinking about the difficulty of that day in what my circumstances had been.  I realize that the day had gone much better than I’d expected it would.  And yet no sooner had the thought crossed my mind, and I cut it down with the thought that likely I’d feel the effects tomorrow of what I thought I’d experience that day.

And then conviction.  Conviction that I am not trusting that God is good. Conviction that I need to live in the grace of today and not the fear of tomorrow.  And conviction that a focus on the fear of tomorrow, reveals that I’m not receiving today as grace.  If I really believed God was giving me what I don’t deserve, it would result in thankfulness.

The holidays seem to bring out the best and worst of me.  

I find myself frustrated as I don’t feel understood or known to the extent that I want.  And I find myself responding by not wanting to seek to know those around me.  Shouldn’t they seek to know me first?

And, again, I’m hit with the fact that for me to think they must meet my needs first, is to think that somehow I deserve being known by them and to believe that they must earn the right for me to know them.

It’s another revelation that I don’t fully receive relationship with Jesus as grace.  I don’t see it as a true gift.  If I did, how could I not reflect His seeking to know without any guarantee of reciprocation?

All of this is woven into the Christmas story:

In the words of Mary as she cries out in thankfulness to God for using her and says that God “has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty” (Luke 1:53).  Both of these actions turn the focus towards Him as the Giver: showing the hungry that they can be fulfilled by Him and showing the rich that what they have is not their own, but under His oversight.

In the thankful response of the shepherds to God’s revelation of the birth of His son.  They knew that they had done nothing to deserve this tiding of good news, but rather in God’s grace He had chosen to bring them in on His story.

And in the thankful response of the prophetess Anna in getting to see Jesus, though she had experienced a life of difficulty in living as a widow for many years.  Her thankfulness was evidence that she received all that she was given as grace, rather than questioning that which had been difficult in her life.

And in the words of Simeon which ring with this concept of greater good coming about through what we might perceive as negative, as he tells Mary, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

And it becomes more clear through all of this that the purpose of God is not the giving or not giving, but rather turning our hearts towards Him.  Sometimes He does this through giving us what we want and teaching us what it looks like to hold it loosely in the midst of having it.  Sometimes He does this through not giving us what we want because He knows it’s best.  And sometimes He has us wait so that our hearts can be turned more towards trusting Him and having Him be the point.  

So whether in the delay of a gift we think is good or in the midst of hard times, His primary purpose is turning us more and more towards Him.  

We have truly been known and given the best by our Father.