More than 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people were waiting and watching for their war hero. The one who would redeem them from Roman rule and free them to be a nation unto themselves. They were looking for a revolutionary.
And they got Him. Just not the one they were expecting.
Because Jesus didn't come to fight wars against flesh and blood. He came to break His flesh and spill His blood so that all men can be free from the rule of sin.
All men.
And all women.
Because if there was any area in which Jesus revolutionized the culture He lived in, it was in the way He interacted with women. When the angel Gabriel came to Mary to tell her she had been chosen to carry the Son of God, that slip of a girl didn't have a voice in her own culture. She had virtually no rights in the eyes of the law and very few in the eyes of her spiritual leaders. She was a small piece of the lowest class in her world, not just because of the financial status she was born into, but simply because she was born a woman.
And yet, she was the first person God invited to the baby shower of His only child.
And there were many others. So many women who got an invitation. Wealthy women like Mary and Martha and Joanna. Demon possessed women like Mary Magdalene. Poor women like the widows of Nain and Zerapheth, the woman with the issue of blood, a crippled woman bent double, and a forgotten woman holding two pennies. Little girls like Jairus' daughter. And old women like Peter's mother in law. Even women the world passionately despised, like the one caught in adultery who was drug to the town square to be stoned until Jesus stepped in.
Women from all walks of life. He saw them all. And His eyes saw past their physical appearance to their needs and to their worth.
For thirty-three years, He showed the world how a man is to treat a woman. He never shamed them. He never demeaned them. He never treated them with anything other than honor.
My Jesus, a revolutionary. The One who is still issuing invitations to every woman in the world. The One who hears and the One who sees every single little girl, the ones known and the ones forgotten, the ones who are treasured and the ones thrown away.
My Jesus, a healer. The One who has taken the sin of mankind upon His shoulders, so that the wounds of women and the wounds of men can be healed.
My Jesus, a king. The One who will make all things new.
I've returned from a twelve day trip to India, and it's taken me a little while to adjust back to my home time zone, the amazing softness of my own bed, and the ability to turn on the faucet and drink water without wondering if it's clean or not.
Such a simple thing...water. I use it three or four times an hour throughout my day without giving it a second thought, but for great parts of the world, it's a precious commodity.
During our first day in India, our group walked the streets of a slum in the city of Mumbai, passing row upon row of houses made from whatever supplies were available.
I can't really describe the scene I witnessed except to say it's poverty on a level one simply does not see in the western world.
And then it happened.
We turned a corner, and there in the middle of the slum neighborhood, was life.
It was color.
It was vibrant.
It was smiles.
It was sounds of children singing.
It was just alive.
And after we had been there a few moments, I realized the life was coming from the water.
The story I learned was the village had only had one dirty, contaminated water source until recently. But some people who wanted to help partnered with a church in the slum and dug a new well, a well with multiple spouts running down the length of this street that now teemed with life. Instead of walking a far distance to wait in a long line for dirty water, the people in this slum could now access it right here...here in front of this pastor's house and church. A pastor who, bent over from the waist, loves his people day in and day out, giving them water from the well and water from the living well.
And it was this water and this love that made life in the desert.
"Jesus answered, 'Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.'" - John 4:13-14
I made a decision to be a follower of Christ at the tender age of seven, almost three decades ago now. Decades that translate to so many seasons I've spent discovering His goodness, seeing my life transformed into His likeness. So many years to watch how He works, tracing the patterns of His grace through time.
And for years I've been following a thread, tracking it from the fruit I see around me back to His heart. Every time I see evidence of it, I am provoked to amazement, for how can He be this good?
The fellowship of the believers. The communion of the saints. The church as the bride. All names for the thread I've watched weave itself back and forth for years in the lives of those around me, producing fabric of indescribable beauty and incredible strength.
I noticed it for sure the first time on the mission field to Mexico at the age of sixteen, listening to Spanish speaking believers pray with fervency. I didn't understand their words, but I had no problem joining my prayers to theirs, knowing the God we prayed to understood us both.
I saw it again the first time my husband and I attended a new smallgroup. We sat with people we had just met and shared our revelations about Scripture, our questions about the same, and what we saw God doing in our lives. We didn't know these people, yet they could relate to every word we uttered because He was doing the same in their own journeys.
I celebrated it in the Czech Republic when the wife of a pastor and I prayed together with the help of an interpreter, both of us hungering for the same things and desiring the same touch from God as we lived lives thousands of miles apart. And again in Poland. And again in Austria. And again in Guatemala. And again in Brazil.
I marvel at it when I pick up a book written by a believer who I will never meet and discover the questions I have asked have already been asked in his mind and the answers I have sought are being freely shared, for the Kingdom of Heaven is all about giving and receiving.
I stand in awe of it when I listen to a living room full of ordinary people pray over a family they have just met, their prayers specific and accurate not because of years spent with one another, but because their hearts are knit together by the presence of the Holy Spirit.
The fellowship of the believers.
The communion of the saints.
The church as the bride.
How beautifully He clothes her.
How grateful I am to have been woven in.
I love the way my heart hurts from beauty.
Lightning storms. White flowers. Pine needles on a forest floor. Moss on a river rock. My daughter asleep with her arm wrapped around the pink bunny.
Last summer, as we drove through the mountains of Colorado, my five year old girl began to cry. Her seven year old brother was worried and asked what was wrong? She sniffed, wiping at her tears with the little hand I love to hold. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that sometimes girls have to cry a little when they see beautiful things.” That last word was uttered as “sthings,” with the remnants of her baby lisp making the soft sound I love to hear.
Her brother didn’t understand, but I did. I had just remarked privately to my husband the morning before, “The mountains feed my soul. Their beauty almost hurts me, but I love it.”
I can’t fully explain the urge to cry when I see the art God paints in the sky, hear the music He composes in the thunderstorm, smell the fragrance from His robes still clinging to a rosebud, or touch the softness of the children He gave me. I can’t explain it, but I do embrace it. It’s a perfect melancholy, that moment of introspection producing a touch of pain with the swelling of joy.
I think it may come from the sense that, while I have a taste of His goodness on earth, I don’t have the fulfillment yet. He shares it with me, but from a distance.
There will be a day when I will embrace beauty without that first instinct to pull back from it’s intensity. There will be a day when I look upon all He has made, with Him by my side, and whisper “it’s good” into His ear.
There will be a day when I myself will be pure beauty. Without anything else.
Until then, I will look at the “stingths” and cry. Just a little.
