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Wow, it's early, and everyone knows I don't do early, but here we go. I struggled and struggled what to get everyone for Christmas, and since we weren't getting a bonus, I knew I had to be creative, and than it hit me. I've decided to allow everyone unlimited access to read, download, and even share with your friends all of the run on sentences and horribly placed punctuations marks that will soon follow in the paragraphs below. Yes, that's free of charge, and you can thank me later with large tangible gifts....
Now, sit up straight, place your hands in your lap, turn off anything that may distract you, and get your popcorn ready...
One of the things that I realize every year is that it seems that Christmas should be the time a year where we are reminded deeply about what it means to love Christ and for our passions to be renewed. If I’m honest and I really look at the first Christmas and read that peaceful quiet intimate moment between a husband and wife as they gaze into the eyes of of their son and savior I can see that Christmas now is not the same.
To me the way we do Christmas has a much different feeling. With parties on every night of the week, Christmas pageants, community celebrations, and of course the annual trip to visit the family, Christmas for me anyways seems to be the opposite of intimate.
And to be completely transparent the word intimacy is a hard one for me. Because I’m not sure that I’m very good at it. But the two things I understand about intimacy on any level is that it can not be forced and it can not be rushed.
When I look at my life I can see that many times those two things are happening on many accounts if I’m not careful. God constantly uses this Psalm and particularly vs. 10 to remind me to take a step back and to be quiet and to be still. Both of which I’m horrible about doing.
Psalm 46 10 & 11
10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
11 The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
It was verse 10 that I could sense God saying over and over to me on October 27th a couple a years ago as I drove home completely broken. It was that car ride that I questioned God for the first time in my life, and didn’t have a clue what he was doing or where I would end up.( It wasn’t the most comforting verse at the time, I I thought to myself, why this verse God, why this verse? Could I please get a strong sense of Romans 8:28 or something a little more cheerful, but it was vs.10 that I believe he continued to drill into my soul)
It was that same verse that I remember reading in a hotel room in California not to long ago wondering why I was so frustrated. I could later see he was showing me that I’d been living the past two years of life out of bitterness and never took time to deal with what I needed to deal with. it was simply me that was getting in the way of God restoring me. (that may only make sense to me)
Intimacy takes time, it takes work, and for probably all of us, it takes us to the place where we’ve got to be still. To drop all of our agendas, our pride and the thought that we can do this on our own. I'm sure we’ve all been to that place in ministry when we’ve tried to force something to work for weeks or months, and it wasn’t until we were still, that God did the very thing we were trying to do.
For all of us this season, let us be still, let us praise God for who he is, and what he has done. Let us celebrate life with him, and let us be reminded that He is God and he is with us.
