Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is Christmas dress-rehearsal, and yet void of the stress of travel and hype of commercialism of X-mas of popular culture. It is a time sanctified to rejoice again upon the bountiful gifts God gives, and especially the Gift, singular.
For something wonderful has dawned and is dawning into our world. Love has come to walk among us. God Himself has become a Man. The Eternal has entered time and space as the man Jesus of Nazareth. He broke in not with fanfare and celebration, apart from a brief display of angelic unrestraint above a Judean hillside. He came as the understatement we have come to love in truly creative works. He came stripped of privileges of deity and emptied Himself into bleak ordinariness. What was only a whisper in hearts of prophets has become Substance, what we have seen with our eyes, what our hands have handled - the Word of Life, spoken from the very mouth of Him who crafted speech.
In that gracious act the One who made everything transformed this mere terrestrial ball of rock hurtling through the cold abyss of terrifying loneliness into a place blessed and anointed by radical chosenness. And it goes on, like a fractal that repeats its pattern in microcosm and macrocosm. For from the time He first breathed the breath of His divine life into a lump of clay, to the birth of hope in the hearts of desert prophets and sages straining to hear the still, small voice, to the speaking of Himself into the womb of a receptive virgin girl, God has been repeating Himself, from age to age the same, creating life out of chaos.
For alas, as one untimely born, He made Himself apparent to me. Coming into this dark matter of self-absorbed emptiness I owned as my life, God's Word gave birth to a new man, blessed and anointed with radical chosenness. Recreated in Christ by a love big enough to love each child as an only, I found an infinite space not to be cold and empty, but to be free, and yet loved with intimate proximity and placed into family.
Oh, God, how great Thou art!
@ copyright 1999 by Scott H. Northrup. All rights reserved.