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Monday, December 25, 2006

between no entrance and no exit

I listened to an old Christmas tape that my family has had for years. It is the story of a struggling single mother living on the bad part of town who is about to get kicked out of her apartment and has no where to go with her daughter since everyone has abandoned her. It's Christmas-time, and she sees no point in celebrating. Her little daughter comes home with a Christmas ornament that she had made in church. On it is written, "All is well." The young mother is brought to her knees. "God, how can this be true?"

I've felt like that from time to time. I've even personally felt like that lately and on behalf of others. "It's gonna be ok Janelle," someone said to me recently. "It has to be ok." ... Does it?

This Christmas season has seemed a little dark. It's been hard to be joyful.
Yesterday, I sat in a pew, holding back tears as a choir sang joyful Christmas songs from a beautifully decorated stage. It was hard to focus. My mind kept wandering to other things.

But one of the messages of yesterday was that God breaks through impossible circumstances to bring possibility to life. God in the form of man, entered time and space through the womb of a virgin; a place marked "no entrance." And yet He came. And God in the form of man was brought back to life after being laid in a tomb; a place marked "no exit." And He still lives. Between these 2 impossible circumstances, God chose to confound all logic and give us life. Nothing is impossible with God.

But what does this mean in the midst of individual circumstances God? Where is your power here and now? There are some circumstances that seem simply irreconcilable, simply too sad or tragic. Is all well here? Will it be?

In the story on the tape, the young mother tells the little girl to give the ornament to one of their neighbors, because she doesn't want it. That neighbor turns out to be one of the members of the church. What proceeds to happen is that many members of the church pass the ornament around from house to house, and as it exchanges hands each time and each person reads the message, each person gives a donation for the young mother and her daughter. At the end, they present the gift of money to her, with the ornament, and the ultimate reason that all is well: John 3:16.

I, by myself, can look around and see no reason to say "all is well" or "it's gonna be ok." But the pressure is not on me to find a solution to the present. I may not always see happy endings to a lot of stories like in the Christmas tape. But somehow, God is working life into impossibly difficult and sad circumstances. The question that I have to ask myself is, do I trust Him?

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