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.