She was the kind of woman in whom I see myself, in whom thousands of us see our own reflections. So often our lives seem pointless, a vain existence in a world that worships vanity.
She was the kind of woman whose biography needed few exclamation points. Invisibility was her most striking feature. Few recalled her, and none remembered any story in which she was either villain or heroine. She was the very incarnation of average.
Many nights, staring at the ceiling, she wondered if anyone would even pretend to miss her when she died, much less shed a single tear in her remembrance.
She was the kind of woman that everyone forgot, even at Christmas.
Yet someone was thinking of her.
While Jesus was crafting the intricacies of the cosmos at the beginning of time, he had the details of this woman’s little life on his mind.
When he planted the tree of life in the midst of the garden, he considered how rootless and dead her life would feel to her.
When he shepherded Israel through the barren wilderness, he was thinking of how the sands in the hourglass of her life would pass, grain by grain, to nothing.
When he was held by Mary on the night of his nativity, he reflected on the Christmas everyone would forgot her, the year she would be gripped by a loneliness too deep for words as not a soul on earth wished her merry.
And while spikes suspended him midair, and sweaty blood formed rivulets that ran down his face, Jesus still had this woman on his mind.
He let go of life to hold her. Greater love hath no man than he had for her. He’d go to hell and back to have her in heaven with him. She was his everything so he gave his everything for her.
We would not recognize ourselves if we looked at ourselves through the eyes of God.
For she was the kind of woman whom others saw as an everyday stone but whom Jesus knew was a pearl of great price. So he went and sold all that he had, and bought that pearl, not with gold and silver, but with the crimson currency pulsing through his veins.
She was the kind of woman in whom I see myself, in whom thousands of us see our own reflections. We are but a drop in the ocean of humanity. So often our lives seem pointless, a vain existence in a world that worships vanity.
Who are we, really, but a bag of blood and bones, in which are mixed bittersweet memories and the shards of shattered dreams and broken hearts?
Christ's vision is 20/20 Love, which transforms his beloved into a lovely thing.
We would not recognize ourselves if we looked at ourselves through the eyes of God.
Where we see trash, he sees treasure.
Where we see sin he sees righteousness.
Christ's vision is 20/20 Love, which transforms his beloved into a lovely thing.
It is like the picture of Dorian Gray reversed. Where we see our horrid portrait of a stained life, God sees perfect beauty, because he sees us clothed in Jesus.
To be loved by God changes everything, for his love transforms everything about us. It is a love unearned, unalterable, unrelenting in its pursuit of us, his pearls of greatest price, for whom Jesus gave his all.
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My new book, Your God Is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places, will be released in January. You can pre-order copies now from Christian Book Distributors, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
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