EPIPHANY!!!

This is another of my recycled newsletter devotionals. My preacher reminded us today that faithsharing isn't about whackin' folks upside the head, but just about sharing, so I'm sharing!

Don’t you just like the sound of that word? Its very pronunciation suggests what it is – that “a-ha” moment when what was once hazy suddenly becomes clear. Every once in a while, I have one of these moments. You do, too. They most often happen when you’re not thinking too hard, when you’re just going about your business.

This is what it must have been like on the day of Epiphany for the Wise Men. They sought a king and found a baby. In that moment, the gift to the Jews became the gift to the world, and things began to make better sense to a whole bunch of folks.

God had tried so hard for so long to get us to GET it. He’d done the flood thing. He’d carved out a letter in stone. He’d run through more prophets than He could shake a stick at, not that that did much good for long most of the time. You can’t blame people for being confused, either, what with so many gods from which to choose.

So I’m thinking that God must have figured we were too obtuse to understand signs and riddles, but we sure did know a thing or two about babies. And the Word was made flesh, and it dwelt right here with us. In plain view.

The tricky part for those of us living now is that we aren’t likely to see the Word Incarnate quite so, well, incarnate. We just make things too complicated. Maybe if we stopped looking and started seeing we would find something of Him all around us. In the work of a former fashion model now devoting her life to discarded humanity in the Dominican Republic. In the voice of a mother recording the Lord’s Prayer for her child, from the bowels of a women’s’ prison. In the generosity of the philanthropist donating money to a good cause. Maybe even, if we’re really lucky, in those moments we do something contrary to our nature because it occurs to us that that’s what Christ would want us to do.

Here’s hoping that every day presents us with Epiphany!