Wrapping Gifts

Last night for our small group night, we got together for a "wrapping party" instead of our normal conversation and discussion "format." What a gift this was for my wife and I! We both commented on our way home, the trunk of our sleigh full of now-wrapped gifts, that we didn't know when we would have carved out the time to wrap the rest of the week. It took just one more thing to try to manage off of our plate before Christmas this weekend.

If you and the people that you exchange gifts with are anything like my family, you never know what is going to be under that wrapping paper. The box that you uncover when that colorful, painstakingly applied paper is torn away in mere seconds could be the packaging of some brand new, it's-just-what-I-wanted Christmas joy. However, it is just as likely, if not more so, to be the tattered remains of what used to be a cardboard box that has slogged its way through one Christmas and birthday after another, its size to convenient and unconventional in the world of packaging to risk throwing it away. And so this "box" is yet another feature of concealment, more functional than the initial layer, but a layer of concealment all the same. Only after breaching this second concealment that the true identity of the gift is revealed.

Isn't this the nature of who we are as people as well? Inside each of us is a gift to give to the world, to a community, a friend, a lover. This gift is not something that is just laying around, commonplace. You may even have multiple gifts. What we do is package them. All too often it is the mistakes that I have made in the past or that you are making right now that we see as too hard to let go of that we use as the packaging. So we take our gift, our life, and we thrust it inside that past and then close it up.

Now, we all know that we can't go around showing off this mess of a box. Who would want to have anything to do with that? So we look around our lives, our world, for something eye-catching and acceptable, preferably something that hints at the personality of what we have hidden away, just to be more believable. Then we take it and we wrap up our beat-up cardboard box lives and that is the present we display to the people around us. The thing is, this present is not a gift. The gift is buried.

The sad part is, what we want to be known and loved for is what we are hiding. What people know is that wrapping we show them. The great part is that the Jesus that I love knows who you truly are and loves it. He isn't fooled by your wrapping paper or your past. He sees through all of that and loves the real you.

Here's the thing that bothers me. Right now Jesus is experiencing the same thing that we do to ourselves. The people that follow Him have an amazing gift that needs to be shared. But we take him and shove him in a box made of the church building and the cold, inflexible attitudes of so many of the people that inhabit the benches and chairs of church buildings. Then every year at Christmas, and maybe Easter, we wrap that box up with smiling faces and services that make everyone feel fantastic and (relatively) welcome. Then the rest of the year, the box is stripped bare, so that there isn't even an inviting veneer to attract someone to the amazing gift inside of that box.

What would happen to your world if you lived out the gift of who you really are, not who you think people want you to be, or what your past has labeled you? How would you live, choose, and love differently? I dare you to live that way.

And if you are a follower of Jesus, what if you took him out of your church and into your everyday life? What if you erased the barrier between your church life and your home life, your Sunday world and your weekday world? It will only happen when you really open up that gift of Jesus for yourself, everyday. Then, all of the rest of your world will see what has been unwrapped.

Moving Pains

Moving can be such a pain. As a current renter it is one of the things that I dread about beginning the process of eventually buying a house. I have only had to move into two houses in my adult life and the inconvenience and stress of that has not made me eager to experience it all over again. Plus my wife and I own (outright! never debt here, but that is a different topic) two sedans, making the moving process even more of an exercise in relying on other people than it would be otherwise.

Obviously then it is not my moving "pain" that I am referencing. That pain is currently being felt by my friends Nate and Julie and by my best friend Matt. For those interested, this is the same Matt from my post "There's Just Something About a Truck". Nate, Julie, and Matt are all a part of the small group that I am a part of that has shared each other's lives for most of the past decade (cue the "I'm getting old" flashbacks here). Nate and Julie made a fantastic home purchase recently and have made their second move of the last twelve months. Helping them move into what is their very first "our home" has been wonderful.

Matt has a personal motive for helping them move into their home. He is sick of his apartment. I can't blame him. This place is tiny. How tiny? I am pretty sure that Clark Kent has knocked on his door a couple times because he thought someone was squatting in his changing room, that's how tiny. When Matt heard that Nate and Julie were moving out of their (rented and fully furnished) house, he took a liking to the idea of living there, since his lease was up at the end of the next month. Nate took a liking to Matt's liking since it is much easier to tell your landlord that you are breaking your lease when you can take the next sentence to tell him that you found him his next tenant.

So to recap: Nate and Julie bought a house, they must move out by the end of the month, Matt is moving into their old place, Matt must be moved out of his place at the end of the month, but N&J are not fully moved out yet. There are eleven days left before all of this moving has to be complete. Phew! even I was having trouble keeping it all straight.

Now, since they are both up against a deadline, Nate and Matt have become moving buddies. Matt has considerably more free time than Nate, so Nate gave him a key to both houses and said, "Go ahead and move anything that needs to be moved." What an act of trust and sign of reliability that is! Don't you wish you could be a part of a small group that waded through your life in this way?!

Where am I going with all of this? It strikes me that the kind of "do whatever you see fit" instructions that Nate gave to Matt is exactly what we are invited to experience in our friendship with Jesus. Nate has no clue what Matt is going to pack next, whether it belongs with whatever else is in that box, will it get broken, will it end up in the room Julie desires, etc. He is saying, "Matt, because of our experience together, I trust that you have my best interest in mind. I am giving you access to all that I own."

Based on what I have experienced with him, Jesus has my best interests at heart, but I still don't give him access to all that I have. Some days it feels like I give him the garage door code, but the door to the house is locked. Or I say, "Jesus, here is the key to the storage unit. I don't get into that all that often, so you won't negatively effect the way I regularly do things there." I don't want to live that way. I have shown just how royally I can screw up my life through my choices. For me, and for all of you, I want Jesus to have "Nate and Matt" kind of access to my life. I want to get to the point where he has access to everything. "Come in, and whatever you do I will adjust to it."

So, today I am giving my entire set of keys to Jesus. What access do you allow him to have?