Jesus in a dish drainer

I don’t know how many times I have started this blog in my head…lots of ideas floating around…different things I have been mulling over. Tonight, I write because I MUST! I’ve realized that having a housemate for the last few months (who happens to be in the midst of a personal crisis) has been a distraction that usually is good and a blessing, but sometimes keeps me from my inner work….the place where I really live life out of. I have realized that for me to live, I must dwell in a creative “space”. God, who is the author of creativity, is with me there, speaks to my heart via my intuition, feelings, impressions, and through the natural beauty around me. Every time I see a bird of prey perched alongside the road on my way to work, I feel as if it is God telling me He is with me. He hasn’t forgotten. He hears my prayers. He knows my struggle for being in a harried, hassled world. My most alive me evolves out of the creative space that I am meant to occupy. “A place prepared for me,” if you will.

How do I get there when the needs around me are great? When friends are in distress, when life’s demands shout me out of bed? My heart suffers when I cannot find a place to dwell. I get angry and frustrated, blocked. In my writing, I am travelling a newly trodden path that takes me back there: to the place I can dwell. That is why I am here. In the doing of this – writing – I am journeying to being. A place where I am at peace with myself and others, where I have had my say and I have been heard by God and people alike, and it is good.

Down the block from where I live, I passed a crèche scene that was still up in someone’s yard, well after Christmas. Kitschy figurines of the nativity company are huddled around the centerpiece of the scene: Baby Jesus.

Little Baby Jesus.

In a plastic dish drainer.

Sometimes I ponder the utter humanity of Christ, how he so humbly arrived into this world of demands, pain, misunderstanding, beauty, and joy, and I wonder, “How did he do it?” God Incarnate, the Living Word, enters the human milieu on the rungs of a white, plastic dish drainer. How did he maintain the place inside where he dwelt? The place where glory abides? We offered him little but grief, and yet he was so alive, and creative, and so intent on becoming the fullness, in human flesh, of what he was meant to be.

I wanna be like that and find that place where glory dwells, and I behold it, and I live in it. And it lives in me.

How about you?