Welcome to Our World...

 I am writing tonight because of a serious revelation that I felt that God laid on my heart at the beginning of this season.  As I was driving one December afternoon the song, “Welcome to Our World” by Chris Rice started playing.  I had already been watching the other drivers as they passed by in their cars, or when I was stopped at red lights.  I do that sometimes, watch other drivers.  I see the different expressions on their faces. I create stories for them from bumper stickers they might be sporting, or license plates, or “family tree” stickers.  However, the one thing that always remains the same in every “imaginary tale” is how lost, broken, lonely they all look.  

When “Welcome to Our World” started playing my heart started to break.  For the first time I started to catch a glimpse of what Jesus really sacrificed to come here for me.  I felt the weight of this world.  With every passing year I feel like it gets a little heavier, and then I feel that weight subside.  Not because I don’t see what is going on in the world, but because with every realization of brokenness, God gets bigger.  The magnitude of His mercy and love becomes more magnified.  The realization that if He had not come we would all be walking under a weight we could not uphold.  If I long for a different place, and  have humanity running through my veins, and I cannot even imagine what He has in store for me in eternity, then I cannot imagine the weight of longing that Jesus carried for 33 years.  

Nine months before Christmas morning, Jesus sat with the Father.  In perfect and personal and intimate communion. He fellowshipped with the Holy Spirit and God the Father.  He saw what we cannot even fathom or imagine.  He experienced the perfection of Heaven and the glory of God and the beauty of angels.  He had everything.  He was GOD.  Then He said goodbye to paradise, not because He did anything wrong, no He volunteered to leave.  To be born as the most humble of human beings.  To grow, learn, live, and love as God made human.  To experience breathing in dust, to feel the aches and pains of a human body, to feel the crushing weight of human emotions, the sorrow that brought tears to His eyes on several occasions and ultimately the most horrific and humiliating death of the cross.  Letting His very human body be bruised and broken to take away the crushing weight of sin.

He endured all of life, His whole existence being shadowed by that tree.  We often wonder about the future, but imagine knowing the future.  Living everyday to the fullest, doing everything that your Heavenly Father asks, with the crushing knowledge that everyday takes you closer to a death no one can imagine.  Every step brings you closer to a destiny that was chosen for you.  A destiny chosen because your Father SO loved the world.  It makes me grateful that God has not deigned to reveal the future to me.  I do not think that I could function under that kind of pressure.  I know how overwhelmed I am with the “what ifs” let alone knowing unalterable FACTS that lead to a painful, humiliating, excruciating death.

The reality that I face everyday is that this world is broken and desperately in need of this Christ that was born 2,000 plus years ago.   A mortally wounded world that is in need of a Savior’s healing.  Every time I listened to “Welcome to Our World” I get another glimpse of just what Christ sacrificed to pursue me, save me, heal me.  As my own heart becomes heavy, He comes to make it light, to inject His healing peace.  So, although my heart gets heavier, it gets lighter.  For He came to carry my burden, He came to reconcile me to Himself, He came to bring me hope in a world of depression and darkness. He came to heal a wound that can only be closed by His blood.  He came to bring me eternal light no matter how heavy the darkness.  From His light, I have the power to shine.  From brokenness comes lasting healing and wholeness.  Light and life I can share with the rest of this dim and dying world.  “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven.” Shine on, friends.  Shine on.