i wish i could take credit for this post. a friend recommended the book One Thousand Gifts by ann voskamp. i haven't started it yet, but ann's website and blogging have already begun blessing me. this is from her work, entitled "a Holy experience". may it touch you the way it has me.
When they ask for a story, I pull up blankets and cover them with words.
I pluck words out of thin air, the only way any story comes — the way the Word came.
Something from nothing, a gift handed down.
“Once upon a time…”
This will be one of those stories— a possibility.
“Once upon a time, there was a baby.”
“Was I the baby? Is this about me?” Shalom sits up on her side of the bed, animated, pats my cheek in the shadows.
“No.” Not you as a baby, I say. “But this is a story about you.” About all of us, about our coming to.
I turn towards the window. The front porch light casts long shadows out across the lawn, out toward the woods. Snow’s falling.
Sky letting go of her down in the dark to blanket all the fields.
“Once upon a time there was a baby. And the baby was born into a family who was very lost. Lost in a spinning, dizzy world.” Shalom curls into me.
“And instead of journeying in the direction headed toward home, the family all stumbled and fumbled around, tripping over each other and grabbing at things found on the road, all these things. But things never help you find your way home.”
The moon gives away her light, soft white laying out across us too.
“The longer that they were lost, the hungrier they became.” Hope reaches over, lays her empty hand in mine.
“Brothers hid what food they found from their sister. Sisters hoarded what food they had and ate with backs turned so their brothers wouldn’t see. The family forgot that they were a family. They forgot they were one. They forgot they were all connected to each other, and when one ached, they all hurt — hurt in ways they didn’t even know.”
“But what about the baby?” Shalom squeezes my arm. “Was the baby hungry too?”
“Ah, no, the baby was not hungry. Because the baby was the one who gave away.” I’m turned toward the window.
The baby had given up the vaults of heaven to be born in the valley of a feed trough. The baby had made its bed the cradle, was the manger for the animals, the place where all the ones wandering in the fields came to be fed.
Born in Bethlehem, the town with the name that means house of bread, the baby came to feed all the lost ones. And we only have what we give away and all our hungry places are only fed by how we make our lives bread.
“But Mama —” She uses her hand to turn my face toward her and she says it so close I can feel it. “How does a baby feed anyone?”
I don’t know if I’m still breathing.
Does she know who the Baby is?
“The baby fed the world because He made his life bread. He gave Himself away.” That’s what I whisper into the dark.
He gave up the heavens who were not even large enough to contain Him and let Himself be held in a hand.
He forsook the boundlessness of space and confined Himself to skin and He gave up the starfields and took on shape and wore the bones.
He gave up the River of the water of Life that flows from His Throne Room to float the nine months on the amniotic waters. And He who carved the edges of the Cosmos, He curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and let His cells divide, light all splitting white.
The mystery so large becomes the baby so small and infinite God becomes infant.
The Spirit took on shape and took the nails and took our sins and made Himself bread that all the empty ones could fill on the Bread of Life.
“The story of Christmas is about a baby who came for the greatest give-away ever.”
“The story of Christmas is about a baby who came for the greatest give-away ever.”
This is what I tell my daughters laying there in the dark, looking up at stars.
Love that gave — but not to those who loved Him.
Love that gave — but not to those who could give back.
Love that gave — to those who were the poor, the bankrupt, the enemies.
Love that gave to the thief who stole instead of waiting to receive… the thief who grasped instead of longing to give.
Love that gave to me.
“And I don’t know… ” I am telling the story now to me. Why is the world hungry when God’s people have bread? Are bread? What is there more to be in this life than to be bread for another man?”
My own selfishness makes me hurt.
“I think that’s what we should call Christmas from now on…” Hope’s turned to the window now, out toward the world:
“Let’s rename Christmas — The Great Give-Away.”
“Isn’t that why the baby came? For God so loved, He gave… ”
What if the Christmas Story became the Great Give-Away — in honor of the baby who gave it all?
The three of us lay looking out at the fields.
This story has possibility….
The sky , it’s giving away her white warmth for all the world.
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