it’s nothing

It’s nothing, really, just a wide mouth mason jar, glass catching and bending Light the way gifts do, filled with our favorite homemade granola, Mexican Hot Chocolate, the flavors warm and rich and spicy, like life. It’s nothing, really, but somehow, it’s also everything when I walk it outside to the kind driver who takes Riley to work.

I tied the jars with a length of red ribbon, blood red like the cord of rescue hanging in Rahab’s window, and I tied on one of the gentle clean-sparkling ornaments I made with my honorary nephew, B, our hands dusted powder-white. And I tied on a computer-printed label that plain spoke the truth, that we give away our favorite things to our favorite people.

I’m realizing, as I pass the jar through the open car window, that the best relationship I know gets passed this way too, in the humblest offerings, one vulnerable hand to another. We can just about hold on to each other this way, if we let vast love fold itself small all over again, if we cradle Him carefully in our palms.

It’s easy to forget, especially this time of year, that instead of the spectacle, our spectacular God chose “to enter the world through the back door,” as Ann Voskamp writes in The Greatest Gift, that He still brings us back to unseen realities by inhabiting whispers. The gentleness of God, all that immeasurable power carefully and purposefully restrained, is the real earth-shattering force, ask anyone who has ever brought weights back to rest while resisting the momentous pull of gravity. It isn’t so amazing that power can flash its might with glitz and lights and volume and fire but rather that real power also possesses enough strength and freedom to move quietly and small, to save the world in defiance of all human measures of richness and strength.

Here is the truth that changed everything, that our vast and limitless God, weighty-rich with a glory no human could bear to look upon, splendid in ways we can’t even imagine, came small, making Himself nothing. Born vulnerable and impoverished, raised up in a nothing-good-comes-from-there kind of town, the King of the Universe came, gentle and lowly. He chose nothing we would expect, and frankly very little we seek, all of us roaming the earth still trying to make something of ourselves. We, as misguided as we are, as broken at the root, transact life in grandiose gestures, in any trapping we can find to draw attention to ourselves and proclaim our intrinsic value, and we stomp our feet when no one seems to notice. We all, if we’re honest, must admit that we seek glory for ourselves.

But God came small, filling the emptiness of a woman and then her arms with human need, the most primal of cries against our suffering and imperfection, tender and subject, as we all are, to death. It’s hard to believe, really, that the things we resist most would be the very vehicles of our salvation, but there it is, then, the real work of faith.

So, don’t believe for a minute the deceptions on the surfaces of the season, those childish notions that size and volume and the ability to capture human attention accurately measure real value.  God has, coming as He did, revealed the high truth that limitless love comes low, with gentle simplicity.

The love that folded itself into a human embryo can and does inhabit homemade ornaments flattened by tiny fingers and crookedly cut.  It fills up wide mouth mason jars of granola and Ziploc bags of brownies, take out containers washed and refilled with leftover soup, and these maybe more profoundly than that massive box you can’t quite fit under your Christmas tree. We resist this truth, apologizing for our five loaves and two fish, humbly offered, especially if we do, right now, look up from the devices we hold in our hands and appraise some of those aforementioned boxes, but that, of course, distracts us from the point, that God came small, and we can give Him away in humble ways.  We must not, as the prophet said, despise the day of small things, and we must not resist our own bramble crowns and rough wooden crosses.

Anyway, I am standing at the open window, passing the granola gift through and into Mr. U’s dark and open hands.  The car rumbles, its momentum temporarily restrained. Mr. U has been substituting for Mr. A, a life for a life, driving Riley while Mr. A has been on a long trip home, and another driver, Mr. O, has been driving Adam, and we feel grateful for all of them.  Mr. O’s jar of granola sits inside on the kitchen counter, waiting on Adam’s next trip to school.

Right now, though, it’s Mr. U who grins wide, whose fingers tender touch, toying with that dangling ornament—one of B’s slightly misshapen Christmas trees, twisting it to catch the light.  It’s Mr. U, nodding and softly offering his thanks to my Merry Christmas, receiving the gift.

I want you to know how much we appreciate you, I tell him, as Riley slides into his back seat and beams out her usual greeting. His laughter sounds like joy.

Oh, it’s a pleasure, he says, grinning wide at Riley in the rear-view mirror, and I’m thinking just maybe that knowing we’re seen improves how we see each other, too.

Because we can trudge a whole long number of sleepless miles under graying, cold blanketed skies and lose sight of pretty much everything, and we can feel oddly invisible as we try hard to keep on loving other souls with all the stickiness of life still clinging to our fingers. I’m pretty sure this is why encouragement was a protective command, a corollary to love one another, and not just a nice idea.

I don’t know it yet, not standing there beside Mr. U’s car, still wearing chilly sweat from a morning run and my running shoes gone dingy in places from my own long way down the road, but this little-bit-of-nothing jar of Mexican Hot Chocolate granola will crank our relationship with Mr. U and Mr. O into another gear. Small seeds birth big trees, and it will be Mr. O, who up till now has been nearly silent behind the wheel, who will start waving broadly when he sees me at the door in the mornings, his hand full-open exuberant out the window, who will start sending me kind greetings every day via text when he pulls in the driveway.  It will be Mr. O, whose usual cab breaks down the same day I walk out with his mason jar of granola, that dangling ornament tapping the side, driving up in a loaner car that says God is good all down the side, plain letters sprawling, and I will think, yes, oh yes, He is, because He knows best of all what it means when someone else finally understands and openly names the humble shape you’re trying to make with your one wild and precious life.

The joy of the invitation I’ve heard, the gift I’ve been unwrapping all season, has been the wild truth that these gifts, which have been a richness to me too, gloriously meager and yet so full, are not just for Christmas. In fact, I have the permission, no, still more, the gentle urging, to keep giving love and encouragement away, letting Jesus come small every day all year, for the protection of all our hearts.

And I find myself wondering why I resist so hard the dailiness of this kind of cruciform living, this everyday opening wide of my arms in an embracing surrender, this ordinary extraordinary giving of big love coming little, passed cradled and unassuming, one vulnerable palm to another.  If my days are too busy, too hard-pressed, to intentionally share the gift that surpasses all the words and flash of the world, then maybe they’re just plain too busy, because, as Ann Voskamp wrote so well, Christians never stop living Christmas.

Jesus keeps coming small in big ways every day, maybe more even, if we believe the scriptures, in the broken-up detritus of our messy daily living than in the glitzy twinkle of the holiday season.

I tell Kevin this, another morning as we run side by side, feeling as new as the day ahead, just simply, I want to give away His gifts all year. I never want to stop quietly living Christmas. I want to go low to live high, as has always been God’s Way.

*~*

Dear one, whether its your first reading or your thousandth, I want to say thank you and to ask you to pray for me (if you’re a praying person) as I put my yes on God’s wide table and press pause on these weekly posts to offer up the writing God’s cultivating in me towards a bigger project.  He’s been calling me to it for a while now, and I have finally seen that in following Him I’ll not have more time for the writing, just more room for trusting Him. A dear friend recently pointed out to me that God’s been training me in the discipline to do this for some time now, and then she asked, “But are you willing to press pause on the weekly posts to write a book?” And in praying through this, I’ve found that the answer to that is yes. It will be my offering to Him as we gently roll our way right into 2026. You may wonder where I’ll begin, and let’s just say this writing and it’s conclusion, which is just part of a big conversation I’ve been having with God for a long time, is a hint. Periodically, I’ll pop in with a post, maybe an excerpt of what I’m writing, and in the meantime, please pray and keep in touch as you can. I’ll keep you posted.