we’ve got mail
Riley walks through the doorway after school, arms loaded with packages, her left hand stuffed with envelopes. Her eyes glitter above the haul, masked though she is by all the trappings of shipping. Her day-weary braid swings and bobs against the backpack on her back; flyaways fall against the rosy apples of her cheeks. “We’ve got ma-il,” she singsongs, before hello or her usual happy I’m ba-ck, before she’s even completely over the threshold. I’ve been shopping for Christmas, mostly online, and Christmas cards have begun to arrive, and there’s just something show-stopping about an armload of gifts.
Riley stops at the kitchen table to unburden her arms, and then, after sliding free of the backpack, pointedly clears her throat. “Ahem, o-kay,” she says, bouncing a little on her feet, taking the stiff posture of watchwoman, or, as we’ve said before, a herald. “Let’s see now. Mom Jones: We have a package for you from,” a pause, while she studies the labels, while she grins at me and pushes invisible distractions away from her eyes. And so she begins triumphantly announcing our blessings, placing the bounty in piles around the house, my packages in my office, Kevin’s and Zoe’s at their places at the table.
Adam leans over Riley’s shoulder, inspecting address labels. Adam loves getting mail, even when the box with his name on it is full of insulin pods. Adam recognizes, maybe better than the rest of us, God’s definition of blessedness, which more than in temporary indulgences or an abundance of possessions, Adam realizes in a fully reliant relationship with God. Blessed are the meek, Jesus said, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
In my mind, I do a careful accounting, noting the likely contents of each box and envelope Riley trots off to stack on my desk, and below the specifics it sounds like this: we’re blessed, we’re blessed, we’re blessed. Every gift given us, from the most practical daily need to the most extravagant fulfillment of a dream, only hints at the generosity of God and the inheritance He bequeaths His children. I whisper thanks and smile with joy and contemplate the needs of other people all at once. God’s generosity moves me to give, because every taste of His glory creates a craving for more glory for Him, and I think, this is why we must keep lists of gifts, a thousand thank-yous and not just for a day or a week or a season.
What if God’s daily gifts came to us every day in packages like these? The idea fails, because The Gift, His presence, can never be contained by any boundaries we know. But, even understanding this, I can’t help but imagine: Would the spiritual gifts, things like His mercy and His love and His grace, just the amount I receive in one day, require a package the size of a house? A city block? Think big and it’s still too small. Paul prayed for power that the Ephesian Christians, along “with all the Lord’s holy people”, might “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:18). The Bible describes heavenly treasures in terms like how great and limitless, lavish and superabundant. So what would it look like if all that forever wealth could somehow be contained for even just a moment?
And then there are the day’s smaller packages, but in this scale and on this earth, small looms large. I think of food, clothes, shelter, transportation, electricity, water, breath, warmth, light, the boundless list of “everyday needs” we all stop counting. And what of all the beauty God allows me to see in one day? That list, too, is endless and ill-defined. In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis describes us like ignorant children who want “to go on making mud pies in a slum because [we] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” We trifle with earthly pleasures and become greedy for temporary things, while God sets before us the opportunity, as Lewis wrote further, not only to see beauty but “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
But could it be that to list the day’s gifts–to announce them as Riley does, to hold them in our hands and stack them up and carry them by the armful, is to look more carefully and understand more fully, to acknowledge the way that God defines blessing, to really receive His gifts, and to declare His generosity aloud? What would it be to do this in the middle of every afternoon, just when the day feels long and weary and overburdened, just when I most feel the emptying of energy and time and hope? What would it be to come home everyday with an armload of packages?
And now Riley has made it past our packages and on to the stack of envelopes, the stacks of Christmas cards that have finally begun to replace the junk mail in our mailbox. She announces each card, each friend, and this too becomes a celebration, drawing around our table the reunion of our found family. As she reads of the names and giggles with joy, as she attaches each one to banners of gold mesh on our doors, my mind tumbles across miles and through years and over memories, and below the specifics, the list sounds like this: we’re blessed, we’re blessed, we’re blessed.
From the beginning, God knew we needed each other and appointed us for love and wildly chose to give His love through us, broken as we are, and seeping with His glory. And as Riley speaks the names, I see faces, and I am surrounded and known and remembered, and this too fills my heart. And I wonder, what if among the day’s gifts I called out the names of all the people God gave me to love and gave to love me, all the other lives and loves touching my own? What if, when I feel most empty, I let this recitation remind me how full I am in Him?
And so, in just this way, in one snatch of an afternoon, God calls me to something greater, and the reminder, carried right in with the day’s mail, sounds rushing and rich and just like this:
You’re loved, you’re loved, you’re loved.
