Fighting When I Should Be Sleeping

It is by fighting the limitations, temptations and failures of the world that we reach our highest possibilities."
                                                                           Helen Keller
                                                                           Recorded by Lucille, December 27, 1930

It's about two in the morning and I am wrestling.

I am immersed in Ethiopia in my head. The house is quiet and the sounds and people and demands of the world as I've known it are all snoring softly in their beds.

The world as I've discovered it, is wide awake.

Ethiopia is eleven hours ahead, so my friends working across the Atlantic are busy tackling the sounds, people and demands of their world. Stephne might rescue a baby this day, or train an Ethiopian social worker. The doctors and staff at Soddo Christian Hospital may remove a tumor or repair an intestine. They will certainly save a life. They face a different sort of health care crisis there. Sam has returned to the children's home from his visit back to the states, his heart full to bursting and tearing as it's affections take root on two continents, for the children he's lived with these past sixth months have taken up residence in his heart.

In my mind I'm in Ethiopia because a few things happened to me when I visited there last November.
          *One, I left a part of my heart there.  How could I not? I met dear friends, hugged countless strangers, ate lamb cooked over a fire with kocho bread, listened to the joy-drenched voices rising from barefoot coffee farmers. I fell in love.
          *Two, I discovered that there was a part of my life I hadn't yet lived, would have entirely missed had I given into the pressing limitations, the perpetual temptations and the whispers of my past that worked as a team to try and talk me into staying put, right here in my cozy house. I would have missed it! I would never have known that I could participate in something that much bigger than my day to day life. I would have missed the opportunity to see the handiwork of a huge God as he faithfully revealed himself in Ethiopia.
          *Three, I realized that my personal "highest possibilities", well, I haven't attained them yet! Not by a long shot! But, I'm thrilled to know in my heart and by my experience that limitations, temptations and failures are lies but the fight is real and the joy is found in beating the lies down just enough to glimpse the higher  things.

There are failures of the world.

There are failures of my life and even of this day.

Sometimes the limitations, even the very small ones, when stacked upon each other like so many bricks, can seem to form a mountain insurmountable. Much like the one made of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink.

They'll wait for tomorrow.

For tonight, I'll keep working on the website ideas for New Covenant Foundation, I'll look at the pictures  and remember that the failures of the world have built a mountain of poverty in places like Ethiopia, and it takes me, and you, and a few other willing folks, to knock it down.

The presence of God is unmistakable, regardless of its wrappings.

Anon.

The passage in Lucille's journal, in June 1932 goes on to say:

Jesus is God talking to the man on the street.

He is the speech of eternity translated into the language of time.

Old Simeon knew Jesus wrapped in a blanket! Orthodox scribes didn't know him when he raised the dead.

God's last word is Christ.

He donned the tapestry of human flesh. Folks were deceived by the wrappings he wore.

He's talking to the man on the street, because he loves him.

He's speaking in the languages of time so all who hear may know.

He's willing to be seen and known by any who will recognize him for who he is.

God's last word is Christ.

Have we recognized him, acknowledged him today? As we move about in the tapestry of our own humanity, can we consider the wrappings he wore, for us?

He had hands like my own -- hands capable of creating, touching, working, holding.

He enjoyed good food and loved his friends.

He breathed in morning air, cool and misted and he may have marveled like I do at dew-sparkles on blades of grass, as little green fields of diamonds.

He was remarkably, totally human in order that we might recognize him as God. And the gospel of his life, the manner in which he lived and died, testified that to God, all people matter. He spoke to the man on the street, talked in the language that people understood, began like the rest of us, a mere, helpless babe wrapped in blankets. Do you know him? Can you see him?

Does it matter?

When I was in Soddo, Ethiopia, a baby arrived at the orphanage. His arrival was simple, no balloon bouquets or staff of nurses floated around a hospital room in anticipation of his birth. His arrival was frightening -- his mother was a teenager, a victim of hostile rape, she had no milk, no hope at all to provide for him. Stoic she sat and retold her story.

The baby was as naked at three days old as he was the night of his birth. Not a stitch of clothing, only pieces of cloth wrapped about him as a makeshift blanket. He was three days old and had not tasted milk. His body was surviving on water and the nourishment he had taken from his mother in the womb.

He was desperate and didn't know it.

He was starving yet had not the slightest idea of what it felt to be satisfied.

He was a victim of a circumstance larger than any of us know how to handle, to fix.

Yet his black eyes shone, his tiny fingers, perfectly formed, grasped with strength and precision of movement. He seemed to me very much like how Jesus may have been:

A baby born to a young woman under questionable beginnings -- weren't she and Joseph merely betrothed? They were desperately poor, had nothing but cloths to wrap the child and when he wasn't at the breast of his exhausted mother, he rested in a feeding trough.

The baby I held will soon be welcomed with grand fanfare into a family far away from his humble beginnings; a family that will value his life, invest in his future, delight in his babbling and first steps and base-hits. But, I saw in that baby, my Jesus. When I held him and watched him wrestle milk out of a little bottle, all I could think was, "This is why there is Jesus, because we are all like this tiny thing. This is the man on the street, his quiet cry the speech of eternity."

Do you, like old Simeon, recognize him? Do you know why he came? Can you find God today in the wrappings of your life?