Ink Blobs, Death & Dirty Acorns

I know what you are thinking: the title of this blog is dripping with Christmas cheer. I thought so too. If you know anything about me, the way I write may start out slightly depressing sounding but turns out hopeful. This may or may not be that.

Every year, I hope that I can see and really understand the what Christmas is a little bit deeper.
It’s something we can’t really understand, not just the fact this baby called Jesus was born and lived and died and came alive again, but the fact that God chose to come in the first place.

The Author, became a blob of ink on the pen to enter inside the story He was writing and change the ultimate ending.

I bet it must have been a crack in the universe for an eternal God  who is life itself, to die. But obviously that was not the last page in this epic story of the world.

Sometimes, the brevity of life announces itself, startling those within ear shot. I had a friend I met in Costa Rica two years ago. He attempted to teach me how to dance and failed miserably, but laughed the whole time. It was thanksgiving, and I was far from home, attempting to speak a few phrases of broken spanglish. He hugged me when I left with my team for Panama, telling me to come back and see him soon. When we got stuck at the border after an incredibly long twenty-four plus hour journey of thinking we were being hijacked in the middle of the jungle and having to hike across a broken bridge, we returned back to where San Jose. When he saw me, he said “I didn’t think you would be back so soon!”

During those crazy months in Central America, I spend a lot of time in this little hippy town bordering Costa Rica and Panama, Puerto Viejo. It became my town, with it’s five dollar a night hostel, loud reggae music at two in the morning, the man who was being stalked by a panther, and thirty-five cent coffee on a dirty beach.

On those beaches I wept, I journaled, I stared out at the sea. I felt alone, I worried, and then I came to life again. I had life-changing conversations, about life, about marriage, about letting go, about the Kingdom of God and what church could look like.

On that same beach, my friend who tried to teach me how to dance that thanksgiving, was found dead a few weeks ago.

I didn’t know him very well at all. We lost contact besides a few Facebook comments here and there. I  am not sure what happened, but I  know he was going through major heartache, and had been in mourning the past forty days. I know his death was sudden and was caused by a literal rip in his heart.

I don’t claim to know what it is that caused him to leave this world. I can’t give the scientific or spiritual or psychological reasons. I don’t know why.

We hear stories like this, and as humans we have two reactions- to run away, or embrace the bittersweet tragedy. I am convinced that running away isn’t the way. We don’t want to be reminded of how life is a vapor, how incredibly fast this all is. But, I am convinced, in avoiding the painful questions, in avoiding the struggle, we avoid life itself.

I didn’t come here to Starbucks to write a depressing blog. I came here to write about Christmas memories, actually, but this story just can’t get away from me. It is like certain stories attach themselves to my soul and won’t let me go free until I resolve to tell them, to let them out into the light and air them out.

All we have is our stories.

I heard Max Lucado a few weeks ago. I like him. He’s like the Mr. Roger’s of pastors. He said how he likes to watch the squirrels outside his office window, he enjoys thinking about how they live and what they do in their little squirrel days, but he would never decided to become one to save them. He just doesn’t like dirty acorns that much.

I may not know the answers right away. I may not understand how love could come in human form among the filth. I may not understand why some people die and some people live, but I do know, that refusing to run away from these ideas, brings me a deeper joy then could be fabricated by living in a farce protection. I don’t really know if it’s possible to “live every day as if it was your last” but I do know that  I need to spend each day I am given remembering.

Remembering I am small and incapable, remembering I am enormous and have the same spirit in me that murdered death.
Remembering my choices to love every day in this short life change the way things in the world flow.
Remembering those who lived and died.
Remembering how long ago in a little town, God came through the birth canal of an ordinary girl, screaming His tiny lungs out, the very same lungs that breathed life into you and I.

And so, may you walk away from your computer with a sense of awe that you have been given another day. May you come to know more and more the indescribable depth of what it meant that God chose to become one of us, simply because He is madly in love with you and I.