You, come flesh.

I am ever confused and perplexed and bewildered as I wonder all the more about Your incarnation, Your taking on our flesh — You: infinite, always, ever — embodied in such humiliation.

I marvel at why, because I know myself.

You’ve made yourself so low, so much like me, and You were offered no mercy at our hands though for mercy on us You came. Even daily, I make efforts to set You on Your cross and bury You beneath the busyness, beneath the meetings and music and more.

You, who wove us together in Your love as we developed within our mothers, You who write our story in Your love as we flash a finger toward you in indignation, You who could not be more inexplicably faithful: I am appalled at Your life, because I am appalled at mine. You stand in such painfully sharp contrast to me, and yet with such remarkable solidarity. I am grateful, if only sometimes, if only with irregular authenticity, that Your entering into our story to redeem it is not merely past but here, present, now, and that Your persistence overwhelms my best resistance.

And so I confess my aggressive subversion, my covert coup for Your throne, and my readiness to abandon Your mission when it does not fit my agenda, when it challenges my hierarchy of values, when it asks too much. I confess I more often put flesh to Peter’s denial, to Judas’ betrayal, to the Pharisees’ self-righteousness than I put flesh on Your life in mine. And so I pray for Your continued patience, persistence, and power, that Your conquering me would serve to be witness to Your reign and advancing kingdom. Help me to put on Your flesh with more  risk, creativity, and love, that You would be known and I would be forgotten. Make Your marks of death and resurrection on my life, and redeem Your world by Your life through mine.

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