behold

“So many people still have their Christmas lights out,” Kevin says, speaking our mutual thought aloud into the chilled night as we drive home, as we slow to absorb the weighty glistening that somehow makes everything else feel a little lighter.

In every season, twinkling lights remind me of Jesus, the Light the darkness can’t overcome.

So, I hold fast to the glowing now, reaching with my eyes, as though it’s a beacon, feeling somewhat bereft, though I can’t decide why, exactly.

Some of the houses we pass drip with stars and diamonds, others with colored lights diffusing softly into the darkness. 

God has lately been training my perspective; inviting me to behold Him.

What a word be-hold; the syllables themselves seeming to drive home a point about abiding.  In English, the word behold developed from the Old English word bihaldan, which literally means to hold thoroughly.  I think of gratitude this way, as the practice of carefully picking up the gifts of God as I go, clutching them to my chest until my arms become so full that His treasures begin to tumble down again, overflowing into a trail of goodness that follows me all my days and everywhere I go, left all around for other souls to gather.  I hold thoroughly the blessings of which I purposefully take notice.

I blink, noticing the way the lights shining from our homes light up the street, how the asphalt blinks like it’s full of stars.

When Moses met with God, His face shone, like the sun.  And as my arms fill and overflow, as I behold God, the light of the knowledge of God, the light He Himself placed in my heart, grows brighter and brighter until it radiates from me.

I smile, thinking that even long past Christmas I can go around dropping light like stars along the road and in homes and in the tired hands of friends, to chase away the shadows.

To behold, then, especially when it comes to God, is more than to look or to see.  To behold is also to collect and take up, to be so full of holding Him as to allow the witness of His glory to indent its impression right into me, to let myself become a part of the One who captures my sight and fills my awareness; to let Him become so much a part of me that He overflows my grasp.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights, God said of Christ.

I can see my breath now, twisting into the night like smoke.

How wonderfully mysterious, that the magnificent weight of God can turn the smoke of me into a transmission of Him; that something as vaporous as my breath can carry light to dark places.  How absolutely wild, that my fickle hold on the gift of God, my weak-eyed beholding, could still overflow, by His grace, to the thanksgiving of others.

Some of the houses on our street, the ones where no doubt the most industrious among us live, look almost hidden now beneath the cloak of night.

“We must mostly feel the same,” I say to Kevin, noticing that the lights on one neighbor’s home look like long strands of tinsel that have been draped by some heavenly hand.  Some of the strands dangle almost all the way to the ground along the front of the house.

It’s something, the way Christmas lights have always been these gifts we give each other, how the lingering of them is too somehow.

My cheeks absorb the brightness, the stunning beauty around me that’s changing the night right into the beginning of a new year.  I feel as though I could look in a mirror and see the twinkling resting along the sharp line of my cheekbones.

“We all feel like Christmas came and went before we could really take it all in,” I say, still musing.

As one year folds closed and this new one blooms somewhere deep in the hard, cold ground, as we all start again from the sleep of the dead, I have been thoroughly holding the truth that the love story of Jesus still outshines the darkness, still fills the emptied, still lifts the low.  His is the stego, the sheltering of love, that always stays, the light that never can be unplugged or boxed up or stuffed away. He is the beholding to which every beholding draws.  Every gift in my arms is Him.

I am beholden, but not in the way I often think.

As I have considered God’s invitation in the new year, behold me, and have run my fingers along the shape of that word, behold, I have also wondered about what it means to be beholden.  I’ve always believed that word to be about a debt, an obligation, to owe a duty to someone, which in the sly, slick, transactional way of the world, can turn it all around again until all that I behold is me, my performance, my duty, my effort.  This is the kind of beholden-ness that can leave me weary and groaning empty.

But as I held it up to the light, I discovered that the word beholden also means bound by gratitude, which means that the same goodness I be-hold and for which I give thanks has also thoroughly taken hold of me, so that I go along not on my own but within the permanent embrace of God. And that is the kind of beholden-ness that keeps me groaning full, longing only for more of Him.

Kevin smiles at me, one side of his face in shadow, the other half reflecting all that beautiful light, twinkling—ba dum, ba dum, ba dum—like a heartbeat, and all I can think is…behold.

To the people living in darkness a Light has come.  And stays.