hemmed in

There’s something about sitting barefaced in the morning flanked by friends, the table strewn with gifts and paper and ribbon, steam curling over our mugs, the conversation like rivers meandering, that has me mulling a repeated snatch of scripture, stacked like ancient memorial stones, down deep below the surface of the living water.

The Lord gave them rest on every side.

Here I am, receiving from God that very thing wrapped up in friendship, rest on every side, ensconced in the protection of love, recognizing its clear action in the movements of my friends’ arms as they help me wrap up grace, in the bright sound of their laughter over the creative use of ribbon.

God has this way of repeating truth, like a drumbeat in my heart, like a perpetual cleansing.  I know what He meant in telling His disciples that they were already clean because of His words, and this promise that He is with me and will be my rest has been a theme for me, not just now, in the season when I feel most tempted to pretend to be the Savior of the World, while I’m meant instead to turn hard toward Him, to lean into His sufficiency, but for most of my life, a counterpoint to the lie of loneliness.

Advent can be such a frantic time, such a deceptively solitary time, wherein making merry contorts into a kind of consumptive hurry, of isolation in glitzy groups, of deepening darkness, but it is into this horror that God Himself still comes, enfolded in human flesh, reminding us that there is still a Sabbath-rest for the people of God, a ceasing from our endless striving, that no matter how thoroughly we may feel assailed, the Lord gives rest.  He still wraps us up in Himself.

I take a sharp sip, the hot coffee warming my throat against Fall’s crisp chill, and reach for a roll of wrapping paper–frosty blue and covered in silvery trees, remembering that just the other day, I was on the phone with Zoe about her broken down car, listening as she spoke of people of peace who had driven their own cars ahead and behind, making a caravan with her sputtering along in the middle, shakily climbing a mountain and then coasting into the valley beyond on the way to the mechanic’s shop.  I had remembered, envisioning this, a favorite snatch of poetry about God’s watchful protection, His alert and intimate knowledge of us.  You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.

God always reiterates what matters to Him, and this He’s been saying forever.

In truth, I live my life swaddled in grace, surrounded with it, as the Psalmist says, like a shield, and my mama heart swelled that day with gratitude for the memorable ways, the envisioning and embodying ways, that God allows us and our children to experience His help, the yoke He bears beside us and for us, that makes life kind even when it’s heavy.

I can minimize this kind of thing when I am giving myself away, when God chooses to let me embody His grace, to shelter another soul in need.  I can forget it’s not me I’m really giving at all, but the solid reliability of Him as the ever-present help.  But when I’m on the receiving end, I know how much it means to be surrounded by faith expressing itself in love through the given presence of people.

Maybe it seems like a small thing, these two friends giving up a morning to sit in our kitchen and help me wrap gifts, Adam orbiting us and chanting indecipherable syllables to calm himself, but they might as well have seen me flailing on the river and paddled up beside me to help me stay afloat.  They might as well have said right out loud, “Don’t forget you’re never really actually managing things alone.”  The Lord still gives rest on every side.

Instead, my friends only gently suggest that we could wrap together, that it would be fun, that they would en-joy helping me.  And so it is that I have come this morning to be filled as well with inexpressible and glorious joy; and so it is, that we have together become the embodiment of grace upon grace already given, the generous gifts of God wrapped up in the arms of the people of God, by the arms of the people of God, those arms moving according to His love and the riches of His grace.

Thank you, I keep saying to Him, a silent prayer flying home as the stack of good work dwindles and I begin to remember that God has always faithfully provided rest for me, and love beyond my imagination.

I don’t often think of this, how I can, especially now, in this season, become grace in bodily form, that is, a reflection of Christ, by being less distracted by my own needs and more absorbed by the needs of others.  I want to believe grand gestures are the powerful ones, to forget that God chooses to do extraordinary things in the day of small things, that He chose a baby’s vulnerable form to make His entrance into the world, that He once fed thousands with five loaves and two fish.  The trouble is, that forgetfulness makes me reluctant to share what I have.  It makes me miserly over a limitless supply of oil and flour.

But here they are, these friends, double underlining God’s point, repeating it, as He always does, by sitting on either side of me wrapping gifts, talking of heart-tending, of God’s transforming power, as we sip hot coffee and cinnamon tea, soaked in the rosy light that streams through the back windows.

One of these friends always says these aren’t metaphors for God’s love that we conjure in our minds but actual experiences of Him—en-bodiment, en-visioning, en-sconcing—that He has deliberately planned and given, the gift of Him, over and over again, wrapped up in beauty, held and felt, and hopefully, received with joy.  We need not look far, the apostle Paul wrote, for God is close at hand, as close, it seems to me, as these friends whose hands gently fold and tape the paper now, whose hands would still, if I required it, to hold my own.