Blessings

Man, I am so blessed. I get a whole weekend of Easter Break, and I have a family to go spend it with, and a car to drive home in. We live in a house, and it has glass windows, so I can watch the cold rain instead of feeling it. We have a piano, and I'm going to play it.

But more than that, I'm blessed because Jesus is more than my mind's logical solution to the truth of my humanity, and more than the reflection of my heart's inbuilt need to to be known. Jesus is God that made me, breath in my breathless lungs, flesh and bone and blood on a cross written all over eternity, the bread that fills my emptiness - over and over again, because my emptiness is not so much an endless expanse or bottomless pit as something chronic and recurrent that appears in one part of me, is met, vanishes, and reappears somewhere else in me. How many elses are there in one person? More than the moments of my life. I can't count that. But it only takes one Jesus for all of them.

The words of a song by Christian artist Plumb have haunted me since high school: "you're a drugstore Jesus - the miracle is gone". She was talking about when we take it upon ourselves to heal the wounds of the world thinking we somehow have the only solution - and achieve nothing at all because none of us is a one-size-fits-all answer. I always contrast this with the actuality of Jesus, who really is the only solution. He comes to us in each moment. He doesn't tell us don't worry, He's seen this before. He listens and looks and makes all the "mmmmmm" noises our moms made when we thought we were the only people with a scraped knee in all the big wide world. And then He heals us, the same healing, but as diverse and specific as the needs of each of us. He's the only one-size-fits-all answer... but He never makes us feel like we are one-size-fits-all needs. He just tells us, and shows us, that our need matters.

In high school I read a couplet in "Rose in Bloom" (good old Louisa May Alcott) that puzzled me: "If she be not so to me, what care I how fair she be?" (George Wither, "Fair Virtue: Sonnet IV", mid-1600s)

I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to mean. How could a beautiful person not be beautiful, and how could you not care about beauty? It seemed oxymoronic and paradoxical. (That says something about both the statement and my perceptions and values at the time.) Even now, when I think I understand it, it still seems oxymoronic and paradoxical. But that is what the greatest truths in life are.

I finally understood it two years ago when I came across this question while reading Soren Kierkegaard's journals: "What good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?" (Journal, 1835)

It's like this. I think this guy is absolutely stunning.

Ok, ok, go ahead and laugh. Nonetheless, I think beautiful is just not word enough to describe him. But as my roommates point out, "good luck meeting him... or getting along with him at all." It's true. It really makes no difference in my life that Tommy Fuller is so beautiful. I'll never meet him and I don't want to share germs with all the girls he's kissed.

So what difference does a person's beauty make to us if we do not consider them beautiful, or if their impact on our lives is not in the end a beautiful one?  Like Soren Kierkegaard so aptly explained it, what difference does the truth make

to us if it has no meaning for our lives?

What difference would Easter Break make to me if I didn't get one? What difference would having a family make to me if they didn't own me? What difference would having a house make to me if I couldn't live in it? What difference would the chance to play piano make to me if I couldn't play it?

What difference would it make to me that Jesus existed -  that He died on the cross, that He rose again, that He loves - if Jesus didn't exist in my life - if He didn't die for me, if He didn't resurrect my heart every single moment of every single day, if He didn't love me?

But man, I am blessed. I get a whole weekend of Easter Break, and my family will be back from singing at the Salvation Army Shelter in Chicago soon to cover me in hugs and kisses and gerbils they want me to hold, and thank goodness the car and I are here in one piece. And I might still have time to play to piano before the family comes back, if I wind up this post now. But the biggest blessing tonight - to me - is that Jesus and I had an awesome talk in the car on the way here, and He's at the table with me now just enjoying my presence, and all of this - all of it - is because Easter means a lot more than Easter Break with my family. Easter means Jesus died - and lived through it - and came back to tell us that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.