Come Just As You Are

Could love have ever been more perfectly captured? In the cries of newborn lungs tasting our air for the first time was the voice of the One for whom the world had waited. There in the arms of a teenage girl, on the floor of a stable, wrapped in rags—His Majesty.

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Fishing Without Him

He let them go fishing alone. They had caught nothing. They were washing their nets.

“Put out into the deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.” The stranger on the shore, the Savior of the world, makes a request of a weary fisherman.

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We Watch ’Em Fly

As a boy, I sat on my granddad’s porch one day and watched a bird pushing her little ones out of the nest. They beat their wings in a struggled frenzy. Then the moment came when they got it. They began to lift and then they were gone.

It occurred to me that the momma bird would be left alone. I asked my granddad what she would do. Looking at me in my endless chatter, he must have considered the relief that bird would know when there weren’t all those little birds crowding the nest anymore. But my granddad said, “Well…she watches ’em fly.”
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Loving in the Margins

Today the waiter who served me at lunch was a skinny college boy whose clothes hung off of him.  He wore an odd looking hat and had piercings. He was very kind to me. The girl who took my money had dyed black hair, black fingernails, multiple piercings, and a leather bracelet, but she sang a little tune to herself and she also was very kind to me. It surprised me that they were kind, and convicted me that I was surprised. I realized that they didn’t have to be kind. I was wearing a suit and looked like an upper middle class lily-white snob. I was convicted to the point of tears when I realized that all of my life I have lived without tenderness, without humility, without gentleness toward so many. I thought I was better than them. Oh, no, I never said that out loud…not with my mouth anyway.
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