Category Archives: Life of Jesus

An Itsy-bitsy Good Deed

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It isn’t every day I get to spend 8 hours in my car. (This time it was a turn-around trip to an important wedding.) Such a road trip offers some nice perks, though: uninterrupted time for praying, thinking, and listening to music.

Honda CivicForty miles into the trip, a silver Honda Civic pulled alongside me and began tooting its horn. Trying to keep my cool, I didn’t look. Surely this person wasn’t inviting a race.

But the tooting continued, so I glanced over, thinking it must be a friend. The driver was waving her arm, pointing to the rear of my car and shouting. Although nothing about my car seemed amiss, I wondered.

“What?” I mouthed, hoping she’d repeat herself, and she rolled down her window. By now a line of irritated cars was following both of us, like we were the lead vehicles in a Grand Prix, but I opened my window, too. Over the rush of wind, I understood her.

DanglingIt turned out my little fuel door was open with the gas cap blowing around on its wire, the cause for her heads-up. After nodding thanks, I worked my way to the shoulder and corrected the problem.

Back on the highway, I thought about this kind stranger and the scores of other drivers who’d passed me noticing the dangling gas cap but chalking it up to a middle-aged woman’s forgetfulness. “Thanks for nothin’,” I thought of all of them, until God’s heavy hand tapped me.

“Are you kidding, Margaret? How many times have you gone out of your way to help a stranger like Honda-woman just helped you?”

As always, he was right, and I was selfish. Over the next 40 miles I checked every gas cap I passed, hoping to repeat the good deed for someone else. But of course God has more in mind than mere duplication. His idea is that we lend a hand on a full time basis, not for credit from strangers but to please him. After all, this is the example Jesus set.

An hour later at a bathroom stop, I got my first little chance for a good deed. The restroom was sparkling except for one used paper towel on the floor. I picked it up and put it into the trash, an itsy-bitsy mini-good deed. After all, I have to start somewhere.

“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds.” (Matthew 5:16)

Praising and Praying with Mary

It’s all good news and thanks to God for a very refreshing week in Florida with Bervin.

Tis the Season

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Christmas time puts many extra items on everyone’s to-do list. Our brains quickly clutter with gift ideas, entertaining opportunities, and pressing errands. As we go about our usual responsibilities, seasonal tasks take priority while everything else slides.

A few days ago, after yanking a stack of cash from the local ATM, I pulled into the bank lot to organize my wallet and prioritize my errands. As I sat with a wad of bills in one hand, my list and a pen in the other, I saw in my periphery vision a man approaching my car. “Now what,” I thought.

ATMHe rapped on the frosty window, and I looked up from my organizational work through irritated eyes. He smiled, then pressed something flat against the window for me to see: my ATM card.

Racing to start my errands, I’d forgotten to pull the card from the machine. This kind man had done it for me and amazingly had noticed my running car in the nearby lot. If he’d chosen to keep the card, he could have headed for the nearest Walmart and gone on a spending spree, since I’d recently made a large deposit to cover a college tuition bill.

Feeling ashamed of myself, I rolled down the window and accepted the card. He smiled and said, “I thought you might need this.”

Last week I blogged about my friend Melanie performing 38 random acts of kindness. The man who returned my card was doing one, too, expecting nothing in return. I wish I’d thought to give him a reward. Then I would’ve had the fun of participating in a random act of kindness, too.

Jesus was the perfect model of performing kindnesses. He healed, blessed, taught, served and did a variety of miracles for the benefit of others. One lavish kindness was feeding a mob of hungry people by miraculously dividing five rolls and two fish to generate food for all.

As the disciples walked among the masses distributing that meal, did Jesus’ hands get tired breaking off bits of bread and fish? There were 5000 men there that day, with women and children probably doubling it. Since all were satisfied after the meal, he probably “broke the bread” (i.e. tore off many thousands of pieces) with human fingers that surely got sore.

Did he receive anything in return? Although the story is told in all four Gospels, none mentions that Jesus even got to eat his own meal that day.

During this season of Christmas gift-giving, each time I pull out my ATM card I’ll think of the stranger and his random act of kindness. But I’ll also think of Jesus, who went out of his way to be kind to others…. and is still doing it today.

“God loves a cheerful giver.” (2 Corinthians 9:7)

Praising and Praying with Mary

We are all praising God tonight for the safe delivery of Anders James! God is good!

A Unique Teaching Method

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Christmas is 10 days away, coaxing us to think again about the baby of Bethlehem. How did the Trinity decide together on such an outlandish scheme to bring salvation to mankind? Divinity reduced to a newborn? And even more incredible, reduced to a single cell within the human body of a regular woman?

The NativityBut that became the plan for one important reason: Jesus wanted to do everything we did, to be tempted like us, struggle like us, feel like us, and live with our limitations. Amazingly, he wanted to be just like us. But why?

One reason was to teach us what a well-lived human life should look like. Another, and of course the most important reason, was to save our souls, a rationale we still can’t understand but enormously appreciate.

I love thinking about Jesus as an infant, then a toddler and a little child. Surely he had an ordinary childhood relationship with his mother, and she did for him all the things we moms did/do for our children. Then as he grew, he lived a model life in front of relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Through Scripture’s pages, he became our model, too. But when did his teaching begin? Was it at age 30 at the start of his formal ministry? Or was it well before that? Is it possible his choice to become a born-baby was meant to teach us something, too?

My mom loved kids, preferring their company to that of adults. I think one of the reasons was her ongoing expectation that they could teach her something, even the newborns. She watched them closely, sometimes talking to them as if they were the Lord’s emissaries of wisdom. “Tell me about God,” she’d say, focusing on the squinty eyes of a newborn who was still a year away from answering with words.

But words or not, Mom expected to learn. And she absolutely loved the idea that our Savior was born a baby “in the usual way.” He didn’t arrive to save us dressed in the armor of a warrior. He didn’t inherit a throne through royalty. He didn’t conquer with guns or swords. Instead he entered the scene unremarkably… just by being born.

Mom used to tell us, “When you recite John 3:16, think about the word ‘begotten.’ God gave us his ‘only begotten Son.’ It means ‘born of parents,’ and Jesus was born just like you, helpless, dependent, needy.”

In the ordinariness of his infancy, she wanted us to learn something. She hoped we’d see that our Savior was approachable in his humanity rather than intimidating in his divinity. Years later we would learn the difference between him and us, of his sinlessness and our sin. But as children, she wanted us to relate to, and learn from, our common infancies.

MangerBecause Jesus willingly came in that humble way, we love him all the more.

“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

 

Praising and Praying with Mary

  1. I’m praising God for the beautiful celebration of Christ’s birth at the Moody Church concert tonight.
  2. Please pray for wisdom when I talk to the doctor tomorrow about my feeding tube pain.