Day 3594 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Luke 2:9 NIV

For faith is in fact quite the terrifying encounter as it asks that we alter our saunter in such a way that all of life is all of the sudden all walked backwards, pretty much blinded, and as upside down as none can imagine.

All because it finds us in a life lived within our trying to find things ourselves. And this oddity of our not finding it sends us binding, bounding, bouncing into the believing in something that is in many ways indeed still terrifying. For how else might we go about the describing of all that we’re finding now that we’ve both been found and in that felt that our fears are futile so long as their forced to stay lost within the way in which we’ve won them from those many who share them?

Seems that’s what changes now upon this celebration of a baby who came to change everything.

So much so that a few guys going about their normal work out in the fields late one night were caught entirely unready for such a marvelous sight as the glory of the Lord shining around them out of the nothingness that they’d known and come to expect.

Can you imagine? Just going along within your overwhelming normality when suddenly something you were entirely alien to even being a possibility was no longer bound by such an ignorance as the magnificence of a luminescence decided to show up out of nowhere? Must have been as if night became day, and this sort of shift only brings to mind every worry as to what other such commonality might be otherwise far unsteady.

We should be able to so imagine. We all should understand even what this must have not only looked like that night but still feels like even today. For ever since God’s will came to us, well, seems as though not much matters in regard to what’s commonly considered, well, common. What is common anymore? What is normal? What is steadiness or assurance or insurance or awareness even? What are we aware of and is it even such a matter of what’s seemed an utter reliance upon our sight continuing to see the continuity with yesterday that we’ve come to assume?

Or did not God prove in Jesus that maybe one day has nothing to do with the last?

Maybe that the past has passed and the future is here and tomorrow may not be. And maybe that we should reconsider, reconfigure, reassess and take recess from the regress of a life lived in fast-forward. Maybe we should slow down and expect more of the unexpected. Maybe expecting anything in life is but an expedience of confusion if not such even further confounded and compounding into a disappointment in regard to the status quos having to go.

Yes, maybe life isn’t something to schedule, so planned out that our plans become our purpose. Maybe purpose isn’t something for us to prove for ourselves despite how much pride we take in the thinking we might. Maybe pride is what brings terror to life. For maybe it’s not on us so insist upon the substance of life always staying the same.

Maybe such a preference for the substance of similarity as pursued daily in comparison to yesterday only keeps us living backwards and thus unable to know what it is to believe in more than we’ve been.

Maybe that’s why angels scare us.

I think of so many stories within the Scriptures in which the sudden showing of the glory of God as came in the presence of an unearthly hope, entirely alien thus, began with the feeling of fear as faced by those faced with something so utterly unknown that they, as we, resorted to their baser human instincts of fight or flight, opting for the latter obviously as who in their right mind would try to fight what makes no sense?

And yet we do. But that perhaps only because we see the rest of the world all but adamant to. Indeed, we are all of us anymore so compromised in regard to compassion that it feels something of such unusualness that it feels only the substance of every single reason to worry ourselves into running away whenever it dares encroach upon our enjoyment of the immaculately maintained. Yes, we’re a people of maintenance, always assuming that keeping a sinking ship running smoothly will help with this whole confusion in regard to personal safety.

For we all want little more beyond our own security. So little in fact that we maybe perhaps only wish for the same for those few we know to love while here. And yet even this rather selfish measure of whom all else might matter, it seems a right terror its own. For who are we to so decide who deserves the comfort of safety as considered against the rest we don’t know enough about to know whether or not they might?

Is all of life truly so ours to so define as to describe this distance between us and where hope is, along with who else gets to make the trip?

Or did not that night Hope show up to show us that we’ve nothing in the way of even understanding what hope really means as it has nothing to do with all this difference we’ve allowed to come between us.

But what then does it mean? Well, we’re told elsewhere that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” And so too that “hope that is seen is no hope at all.” For, “who hopes for what they already have?” Alas, this seems to not really be getting anywhere all that fast in regard to the figuring out of what hope means. Perhaps a look at the dictionary?

Hope is defined as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” Ok. It’s something personal then? Something then for each of us to define, decide, design? Best left then to leaving us all alone so that we might so determine what we desire and expect to happen? Nothing then of any harm in maybe desiring what might keep us, say, afraid of dying? No issue with designing or defining or even, as of now, defending a desire that demands a degree of fear as found and felt in our expectations going otherwise unmet, albeit entirely personal at that?

Is hope truly something so unhinged as to allow us each to plunge headlong into it without any way to ensure our safety as expected in things going as we, well, expect?

Did those shepherds expect to see a bunch of light come streaming out of the middle of the night? Did they find hope then in the unexpected? Did Mary when she arrived to find the tomb empty? Did Daniel when the lions declined an easy snack? Did Joseph as he was dragged to Egypt as a slave and foreigner all at once? Did the people Moses led there out truly expect that sea to part in order to help them find the hope on the other side?

Would we?

No, I can’t that personally. Can’t say it for you either, but I can imagine you might agree. For here we’re used to commonality. In fact we seek for it far more than we crave anything else. We almost seem to assume that we might not survive if today proves of a divide from the designs we made yesterday for how tomorrow should come. Indeed, we live nowadays, as I assume they did back then too, as if tomorrow is not only promised but is in fact where all of our best potential is waiting to be proven.

But then again, maybe only until tonight.

For it seems as though that’s just how fast faith seems to unmask our masts as made into the winds of want as we sail upon these seas of fortune favoring those bold enough to believe in only a repeat of the past as will always be preferred for the relative safety of the already seen and thus well known.

Yes, we’re here paupers and princes pretending we know only the life of the latter as we couldn’t possibly be so very lowly as to need a surprise to upend our night by turning itself to day at the demand of God unwrapping His will to the unraveling of our own. And thus we fight to keep welcoming the fear of our being terrified by, ironically, what’s already been seen and thus too well known.

And that’s something that only we could pull off!

But why do we? Why do we still welcome all this fear as faced within our forcing of hope to be so rewritten that it anymore means almost nothing of what hope really is? Do we just prefer the shock and awe of finding all our plans either exposed or left to explode into what’s anymore a likely tirade of tears as felt by all throughout all these years lived still expecting the night to stay dark? Or do we just need the light to not insist upon such fright as our normality being seen then finally without any reason to be so preferred?

There are so many wonderful oddities to this time of the year that so often go unwanted simply because our expectations have declared them unwarranted. We don’t want the changes as they feel challenges to our arrogance always insisting that the very best thing for us is for us to be left alone to live this life as if it’s our own. No, we don’t want to be so owned as to hope in something, somewhere, someone other than us. And thus we find all this commercialized confusion as created to suit the delusion that we can insist night stay dark, our days stay free, our costs never come, and that maybe Christ didn’t either.

But He did!

And yes, it upended everything! So much so that a bunch of shepherds were entirely freaked out and some wise men set out from their corners of this nowhere with gifts to give for nothing but something they could have never expected but entirely, for reason, trusted despite this baby being born to nobodies being absolutely no part of their design of what hope should be. Indeed, what is hope if it’s even something we can hold inside our imaginations?

Who hopes in what they hold?

I don’t want to have a hope that I can have. I don’t see any reason that my hope should have anything to do with me. Because I know my version hope and how it’s always held inside such things as nothing ever changing or my plans never failing or my preferences always being as important to everyone else as I insist I actually believe they are to me. How can I know for sure? Especially now that God has shown that not even night is always to bring the normality we expect?

What of life has anything to do with what we expect then? And yet why do we still set our expectations up for the failures they so often invite?

That’s one of the larger lessons I’ve personally learned this Christmas. To reconsider my expectations. To maybe try and realign my life in such a way that it doesn’t rely so heavily upon what may prove even more of the misplaced hopes I held so tightly in the past. To realize that life isn’t mine to understand but rather an understanding that life isn’t mine at all. Because God doesn’t need us, and yet here we are celebrating not only the gift of life but of one that came to save what all we’ve made of ours here inside these lives of hope lived only hoping for nothing any different.

And still we’re terrified when it comes.

Maybe we don’t have to be anymore though. Maybe today we can learn to expect only the unexpected. Maybe we can begin to try a way of life in which we both plan for the best but expect things we could never plan for. Maybe we can take this gift that we’ve been given and welcome it as a catalyst to the kinds of change that we never wanted to welcome. Maybe in that we could welcome the kind of hope we’ve never known.

And maybe in that we could finally see that hope is a gift given from above rather than one designed or defined by us living as if all there is is down here.

Because maybe God has more going on than we can see or expect or define or measure or even make sense of. Yes, maybe God’s will only makes sense when considered outside of these selves that so insist upon everything lining up according to our pre-planned programs of what a life is supposed to be. For friends, how do we know what life is supposed to be or how this is all supposed to go? Is there any hope to be found in our trying to find out?

Or is there not only hope felt in our finding that we can’t, but also that in that we never needed to as the arrival of a baby blew our world apart in ways that we still don’t understand. Simply because He came to prove that we’re not home yet.

Because home doesn’t know fear. Terror isn’t welcome. Worry isn’t either. Sadness and sorrow, no, they’re not seen. Anger, jealousy, want, wickedness, none of them where He is. Darkness, as we see here, even it must flee from even a baby. Let us then live no longer in such a way that we too see light as a terrifying thing. For maybe it has nothing to do with the difference or distance between night and day but instead the distance He came to overcome our insistence that that distance stay the same.

He’s not good with that, hence the Christ which gives Christmas its root. Indeed, He came in humility in order to be everything that didn’t fit, wouldn’t make sense, couldn’t be perceived and simply wouldn’t concede. All because He knows that we have no idea what we’re doing, simply because entirely too much of this life has become so normal that our only hope is found in everything being always expected to stay the same.

But friends, if things don’t change, then we’ll only be left terrified once again when again He comes in the light of the Heaven to save those who are His from a life lived in a place that still has no room for Him.

“But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’”

No, nothing to fear as it’s widely considered silly to be afraid of a baby. And yet we live in a world that is. Because babies don’t babies. And nor does this One expect us to stay as He found us either. He has more hope than that for us.

Question is do we?

Well, we could and thus should but only if and when we remember the reason that this is a season in which we celebrate the unexpected. It’s not because of the fear we feel in the unexpected, but rather because He’s proven that our expectations have nothing at all to do with giving life, let alone a life its meaning. No, He decides upon such things. And today we celebrate that He decided to give us a life that came to save our own so that we might live with Him for all eternity.

And if there’s a greater hope to be had than that, well, you’d think we’d have found it by now. But we still celebrate Christmas, and so I guess we haven’t.

So maybe today we can stop looking. Because friends, it really does get no better than this!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

#LeaveNoSoulUntold