Least

This book, it’s busting at the seams with these words, promises, shaken down and overflowing.

Everything in this story, this world, is upside down, or perfectly right side up, depending on the eyes that are doing the seeing. Feeble newborns. The bruised and disgraced. The neglected, poor, unknown. The habitual, now almost expected, choosing of the weak to shame the strong, the absolutely filthy to be made pure, all of this nothing to be made into something.

"Is there anywhere this hallowed presence of God won't appear?"

He is present in, showing up for and exalting the lowest. Even he, grandeur incarnate, clothed himself in skin and trod our dusty streets, condescended homeless and despised for the sake of his own.  

He became the least to save the least and I want that. That is real me, real living.  

How do I join this great condescension?

If real, honest life is knowing him and he shines bright in the insignificant and unexpected, shouldn’t I be there waiting for him? 

How do I become the least and love the least, carving out a home for him and serving him in order to behold him?

If I hold fast to this gripping mask of pride and self, I am an apparition.

If I trust and act in my own talents and skills and sense, I’m lacking.

If I overlook the fatherless and ignore the hungry and skirt around the messy sinners, I’m the one who’s got it all wrong.

If I don’t drain myself dry for the disabled and distressed and utterly hopeless, I. miss. him.   

But if I do, the promises:

Your light will rise in the darkness. I will guide you continually and satisfy your desires in scorched places and make your bones strong. You will be like a watered garden, like a spring with unfailing waters.

Lower. Lower. Less and less yields fullness, abundance! Oh grace to get it right.