All You Don't Have

Years of difficult finances and debt have left me somewhat enslaved to counting the dollars and "figuring things out." It's a terrible way to live, and I've felt trapped there by circumstances with no way out despite my endless "figuring." But last Sunday at church I heard God's unmistakeable voice in my head saying, "Stop counting your resources." It got me thinking about Gideon and self-reliance and miracles.

God charges Gideon with attacking the Midianites, but he also says this about Gideon's army: “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’" (Judges 7:2) Gideon started with an army of over 30,000 men, but ultimately God used an army of 300 to defeat the Midianites.

As American Christians, I think we are big fans of the gospel of self-reliance. We love the idea that God helps those who helps themselves, despite the fact that there's no Bible reference for that one. Grace makes us uncomfortable. Lack of personal responsibility even more so.

I am all about personal responsibility. I love it so much, because if something is up to me, then I can make it happen. If it's someone else's job, well they might not do it. But if it's mine, I know I will. Yes, I just might be a bit of a control-freak workaholic, and God just might have been working on that in me for the past decade or so. The reality is that despite my best efforts, I cannot fix my mess. I don't have the resources to do so. And I am not just talking financial resources. I'm talking about all kinds of resources -- time, emotional reserves, ideas, opportunities, wisdom, love... I cannot resource my way to the changes that need to happen in my life. I don't have what's needed, but God is telling me he doesn't need me to.

Transfiguring things is something we cannot do, but it IS what God does. I come with water, and Jesus makes the wine. It is a miracle, plain and simple. This is what I hear God calling me to. He's saying, "Let me transfigure things. Give me your water, and I will give you wine. See what I can do with all you DON'T have."

I lack the financial resources to change our financial picture in any real way. I lack the emotional reserves to not feel pulled down by difficulty, to live life lightly. I lack the time to devote to writing because I am fixated on the financial resources I need to earn. It's the beginning of a new year, and I feel invited to a miracle. What can God do with all I do not have? We shall see. We shall see.

Making Room

Christmas is over, but I am being hounded by a message sent home in my son's preschool papers. It was a brown construction-paper nativity scene with stickers to place for Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. Inside the stable was a piece of paper that said "We are all innkeepers." I cannot stop thinking about it.

Like the innkeeper, we all have a choice to make, except that we get to make that choice again and again and again. Will we make room for Jesus? Will we make room for him in our happiness and our sadness? In our successes and our failures? In our darkness and our light? Are there places we think he cannot or will not go? Are we afraid he won't come into some places or afraid that he will enter some places we keep for ourselves?

This Emmanuel, this God with us, will come in anywhere. The whole born in a stable thing makes that perfectly clear. What is more vulnerable than an infant? What is dirtier than a stable? There is no place in our lives that Jesus is afraid of. There is nothing too messy for him, although sometimes I think it's easier to let him into our messes than into the things that seem like they are going well.

At the beginning of this new year, I am asking myself, how will I make more room for him? My life is maxed out -- full of demands and responsibilities and people to love and take care of. I can't "make" time. For me the only answer to making room is to see Jesus in the now. God, the I AM, is present in every moment, so making room is a matter of seeing in a new way. It's not even so much inviting God into the present moment (although sometimes it may be that) but more of seeing that he is already there -- God with us, God with me.

Yet I think God is asking more of me. I am that cliché of a woman, who can make time for anything and anyone but not so much for herself. I make little time for writing or the things I want most, but I hear a whisper asking me, "Will you make room? Will you make room for you? For your gifts?" I am not sure why I resist my own self so much, but this morning I am wondering whether making more time for the things in my own heart won't be its own way of letting God in. When I write and do the things I love, I think I make room for us both.

My heart is its own inn. What good does it do to say yes when he asks for entrance if I'm not truly occupying the space myself? Here's to a new year.