Is it time to dive into 2021 with excitement, resolutions, and intentions? Or is it time to reflect on feelings of post-Christmas emptiness?
Or maybe a little of both?
We all need space and time right now.
Even if we haven’t cleared out the decorations yet because we’re still waiting for Epiphany — and also if we can’t wait to flip the calendar pages and clean house and pick a new word for the year.
And especially if we’re wondering how things can really possibly be any different today, just because the calendar says the year is new.
My word for 2021 is ptochos - the Greek word in the New Testament that translates as “poor” in the sense of desperately begging, from ptosso (crouching, cowering) — as opposed to “poor” in the sense of respectably pulling through on one’s own in straitened circumstances: that’s penes, from peneo (to toil).
Guess which “poor” is used in the Beatitudes’ “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? I asked one of my kids that, and they guessed the latter, penes, the trying-hard-to-get-through kind. But no, it’s the embarrassing kind of “poor”: the kind none of us wants to be.
“Christianity (evangelism) is just one beggar telling another where to find bread.” I’ve heard this quote but can’t yet find a definitive attribution (Martin Luther or D.T. Niles?) - in any case, it fits. Isaiah 25 describes a feast for us, and a swallowing-up of death for Him, the Bread of Life (John 6:35ff). We get to trade our ever-growing hunger of “not enough” for the feast of His delight and satisfaction.
We all need space and time. Right now, and always.
And that’s one of the reasons God entered space and time at Christmas. To let us know that He is with us: meeting us in our falling-short, and bearing the shame that goes with it. He comes and finds us on the “hedonic treadmill” of never-enough, and He picks us up and carries us off into what Malcom Guite calls “the spiritual state of being beholden, itself paradoxically something into which we can recline and rest.” (Waiting on the Word, p112)
He is with us in the present, as He has been with us in the past, and He will be with us in the future. We don’t see our future, but He does. We don’t understand our past, but He does. We don’t even know ourselves — but He does. He knows us fully. He is with us completely, hemming us in behind and before (Ps 139), pursuing us with goodness and mercy all the days of our lives (Ps 23).
He finds us wanting — He finds us, wanting — and He fills our emptiness.
He feeds us and leads us - with delight: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:33). I wonder if that’s a preposterous idea, but I suddenly remember how delightful it’s been to feed and lead our children, and to include them in our family — and then I think, no, He actually is convincing me here.
Let Him convince you, too. Take Him up on His promise that He will let you find Him if you seek Him - because He is already seeking you. With love.
Happy 2021.
