My Christmas Blog - Reflecting The Past Year

God was silent for 400 years between the Old and New Testament period, perhaps some of you feel He is silent today. He is not, but you are not so sure as you look at your life or the world around you. In the time period before Jesus was born the Israelites were in despair thinking God had forgotten them.

The first time He spoke again it was about babies. Yes babies! The priest in the temple at that time, Zechariah, received a message from an angel while he was in the temple by himself. He and his wife Elizabeth were going to have a baby. They were elderly, childless, barren. This was the declaration of God after 400 years, that John the Baptist was on the way. John would be a frontman for the coming Messiah.

Zechariah did not believe this message so he was struck speechless until the baby was born. There are consequences for not believing Gods messages.

Most people did not even know God had spoken because Zechariah was left speechless so he could not tell them until after John was born. Then the story came out!

Six months after this announcement an angel visits a young teenage girl named Mary. Mary and Elizabeth are cousins. Mary too is alone to hear the announcement that she is about to become pregnant with a very special baby, the Messiah, the one we know as Jesus.

Mary praises God for this news while it means her life is about to change in drastic ways. She is engaged and he was not going to be the father, single mothers were not a thing back then but Mary praised instead of feared.

We hear this story over and over and think: how on earth could these two things happen? A elderly barren couple, a virgin with child. We know science and it is impossible.

I laugh outloud at this because if you have read the Bible at all, most of its stories are impossible by human standards. Human effort is not the story of the Bible. God is.

The past year has been brutal, exposing, unexpected and unpredictable for me. There is no way I can explain what all happened this past year in a way that will ever make sense to me or to you, it is simply indescribable.

I have only just started “feeling” the past 3 months. I honestly did not know how “not feeling” and broken I was. On many fronts it appeared God was silent but in my heart He never stopped talking. While I did not get answers, I got presence.

The word makhasabah, is a Hebrew word for a plan, but the deeper meaning is: meticulously woven, carefully arranged woven plan. The picture at the top shows how many threads it takes to make a woven fabric. If you want to create a picture in the fabric it is not just the threads, it is the skill of the weaver to introduce the correct threads at the correct time. A woven fabric can be a true thing of intricate beauty.

In order to make a picture of a flower on a loom, the weaver blends lighter and darker threads to cause shading, contrast and color. The result is stunning when done correctly. The weaver knows the plan, the pattern of the threads in the fabric.

God is the master weaver, the word makhashabah is used 3 times in this famous Jeremiah 29:11 passage.

“For I know the plans (makhasbah) I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans (makhashabah). to prosper you and not to harm you, plans (makhashabah) to give you hope and a future.”

If you remember from last week God spoke this to His people after a time when they had been taken captive and everything seemed destroyed.

The weaver (God) had allowed some dark threads for shadows and contrast into the weaving of His people. God allows some dark threads into our lives as well. But He does not do it callously or meanly, and I am not saying He caused it. I am saying that at the period where darkness came, He did not stop it. He knows the plans He has for you, plans to give you hope and a future. He is creating a tapestry that will be of priceless value, more beautiful than we could describe. You are that tapestry and He is walking with you every step.

How do I know this to be true? I lived it.

A week ago I was having a “session” with God. You know, me venting and Him listening.

I said: You know it feels like this past year you let me get hit by a truck (not literally but emotionally, starting with Brian’s death) and then when I was on the ground you let it go back and forth running me over again and again (Martha’s dead, Mochas death, cancer, surgeries, medication reaction).

You left me there for dead!

God: I am with you and I have your back. So much so that I was on top of you, literally on your back as the hits came. The truck ran over Me too and without Me on your back, you would have been dead.

The tears came full force as I was given an actual vision of this and I realized just how much my God loves me. Did life happen? Yes. Was God aware. Yes. Did He actually stand back and let watch it happen? No, He actively participated.

The weaver did let some dark threads into the tapestry of my life, yes really dark ones but to create the same flower, the weaver has to introduce lighter, brilliantly coloured threads to capture the light reflecting on the flowers. I had been given a present to glimpse both dark and light threads in my tapestry. I knew the weaver had never left me.

In mulling all this past year over, so much still does not make sense but God was there in ways I could never have thought. In history over 2,000 years ago, in the darkness and despair of the Israelites feeling like God had abandoned them, God came literally Himself, Jesus, in baby form.

He has our back, He knew we needed to see God up close and personally. We needed to see and hear and learn what and who God is like. This is Christmas: a God encounter of God coming and walking with people, all people.

Jesus came, not the way we would have expected God to show up. Humbly, poor, defenceless as a baby, born under suspicion of an unwed (engaged but not married yet) mother.

How like God to show up in darkness and when He appeared a star like none other, a radiant light, ushers in His birth. Angel armies appear in the sky singing! His birth is a mixture of dark and light threads on the tapestry that is mankind.

Only a few understood His significance.

A man named Simeon, was one of them, he saw Him at the temple as a baby.

Simeon had longed to see His Messiah, he knew God would not abandon His people. He was waiting for the gift of God to come. The gift that would change the world and change us personally, if we let Him.

Expectantly we look at all the presents under the tree wondering, longing what is in them. Simeon got his present- seeing the face of Jesus. Perhaps after Christmas when those things we “wanted” disappoint or the emptiness is still there, we too can look for the face of Jesus, the baby that came and grew up in our world, our Saviour of the world. He never disappoints, the world does, He never leaves, the world will, He promises to be with you forever.

There is a painting called “Simeon’s Moment “ by Ron Dicianni that captures the moment Simeon gets it, he understands just who this baby is. Have you had your “moment “ yet? Where your heart realizes only One present can fill your heart. In the tapestry of your life, between dark and light threads, “the light of the world” has come, Jesus.

Merry Christmas my dear friends.