Birth a little girl into a family that would some day become a family of ten, and give to her a mom who would teach her about the Jesus who loves her and the God you can cry your broken prayers to. Give her a daddy for whom her heart would ache with a longed-for affection. Allow her daddy to make the wrong choices that can come from a man whose sexual perspectives are distorted. As the little girl grows, allow still more for her own sexual distortions – abuse, sexual games within an institutional environment, more abuse and a growing desperation to fully know the love of her daddy. Shatter and scatter her family of ten and allow the children to each find some way to somehow control their lives, although each will find their own ways only bring more brokenness. Teach the young girl still more truth about God – academic, doctrinal, but nothing to touch her brokenness. Let her be shamed by her brokenness and let the God she reaches for seem to shun her as He seems to keep her at a dark, oppressive distance. In the beginnings of adulthood, bring a man to her to love her, one to whom she gives her expectations and finds that expectations smother love. Give to her a child to cradle at her breast, one to whom she can pour out the love she longs to give and one who will return her love – so she reasons. But her reasoning crumbles with death, and the child at her breast becomes the child who lives in the literal presence of Jesus. Give her other children, but keep her shame and guilt alive. Give her even a position of influence and allow her to speak words of truth – words she doesn’t fully understand, and words she cannot own for herself. Her God is still distant, and unforgiving, and punitive.
Birth an Infant of perfection within the darkness of a broken world in which there are many just like the little girl. Let the Infant be the heart and love of God, the very expression of God. Allow Him to choose to sacrificially give Himself as He stretched His arms out on a crude and shameful cross. Give Him light and compassion that will span all the generations to come, and even the ones that have already been. Help Him find the little girl He created and whose life He was shaping even though her guilt, her shame, her questions, and her doubts, kept Him hidden. In God’s time, bring together the truth a mother gave, with the light of understanding that was beginning to erase the distant, unforgiving, punitive God she had believed in. Through godly friendship, through the crying heart that searched for understanding that would touch her brokenness, but most of all, through the overflowing, incredible, insatiable love of the Infant who stretched out His arms on the cross, and then never, never quit searching for the young girl – in all of it, bring the miracle. A miracle to touch the brokenness. A miracle to understand the brokenness. A miracle to heal the places that were raw with guilt and shame, loss and pain. Let her position of influence speak with a new freedom and a freshness of the reality of the miracle. Let the miracle of grace be multiplied in the lives of still others as the young girl, now grown, longs to speak, to teach, to write, from a reality that is still growing and still becoming, but one that knows the Giver of the miracle – a miracle of grace.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 40:1-3)
