The Quest for Worthiness at Christmas

It's 8pm on Christmas Eve and I rush to Target to get those last minute gifts. Not much in the bank, not much energy in my reserves, not much time left. I grab the stuff I was looking for and decide to make a quick run through the store should I need anything else I forgot. I've been so busy that I haven't had but a few days to actually think about what I was going to get people. As I'm looking at mugs I hear a yelling spat between a father and a young son towards the back of the store. Both claiming the other needed to listen better.

I haven't had much rest. It was a busy week but God really blessed me in the midst of it. Even though earlier in the week I had received a message from someone I ended up having to report as sexual harassment, and discuss thoroughly with my counselor and EMDR therapist. It's a continuation off of the last several weeks - this quest to step into worthiness. This struggle with never being good enough.

This Christmas season has brought me on a most atypical journey and yet so much of what is going around me has given me a different perspective on Christmas this year. On the birth of Christ, the Wise Men, Mary and Joseph, hope, light, truth, and brokenness.

Tonight as I think about Christmas and this quest into worthiness I've begun, my heart groans. Worthiness. To have a King become a baby for me? To humble Himself so low to demolish my sins? Looking at worthiness, I am completely unworthy of that depth of love. And yet God says just receive.

Receive the poverty, the vulnerability, the humility. Receive that nature obeyed the commands of God beyond what it was designed to function as. Receive that a young couple were chosen to endure the shame so that their Savior could be born. Receive that when Jesus cried that first cry, the cry of God's heart for the nations, it wrenched the veil between heaven and earth. For the first time since the Garden of Eden, God walked with man in the cool of the day.

Who am I that my Lord should walk with me and talk with me...and dance with me and sing with me, and bless the work of my hands, and provide for me. Give me people to surround me, a radio to blast praise music over, a roof over my head, money in my account, people to connect with, the sensation of the keys under my fingers as I type. The air in my lungs. I am mere dust. And yet He came because He sees us as something much more. And He calls us to something much more. And it's that "much more" that gives us our worthiness. It just is there, because God is always there. Separate from God we are nothing, merely chasers of the wind.

At Christmas we are called to remember. Remember the story. Remember what happened. Remember the hope we were given. Remember, and lay down our gifts before the King. "What I have I give Him, give Him my heart."

The quest for worthiness begins at Christmas. When the breather of life took His first breath in human lungs. Fully God and fully man. When Jesus was born so He could die. His coming was because He saw us as worthy to give up His glory for. Worthy to enter into the brokenness of our world so He could know us fully and so we could know Him. He became the source of joy - a joy we often struggle to have because we feel as if we may loose it at any second. But just like unconditional love can never be earned or lost, worthiness can never be earned or lost because according to God we just are worthy. By nature of being made in the image of God, being made for His pleasure. It's more the feeling of worthiness that is hard to grasp, and yet deep in our souls there is a cry to know we have worth beyond our frailty and brokenness.

The answer is we do...from a King who too knows what frailty and brokenness is.

Merry Christmas everyone!