When you’re a first-generation Christian, a kid who didn’t grow up in a Christian home, who wasn’t raised in a home where the Word was read, you can end up as 7-year-old kid hospitalized with an ulcer, because your body has a way of telling your story that your words don’t quite know how to tell.
I was this scrawny, freckled-faced little girl, upstairs every night in a farmhouse bedroom, terrified to fall asleep because I was terrified of dying, of closing my eyes, and never seeing light again, of getting trapped forever in the pitch black dark.
This kid who never stopped trying to pretzel everything into good enough for everyone else… who became one terribly painful knot.
When your family is all about working for a sense of worth – how do you feel like you have any worth if you don’t keep working perfectly, relentlessly… hopelessly?
The question to ask is: What if I was more passionate about their salvation than concerned about my own reputation?
When you have no idea that this is our Father’s world, fear can become your world.
What if no one had ever shared that there was, right now, good news that was working to undo all our bad news?
What if no one had ever shone a light into all our dark, that it was such a relief, I had to come sit… no, live the whole of my life — in its glorious warmth?
What if two immigrant farmwives, neighbors, hadn’t invited all the neighboring farm kids over for watered-down kool-aid and chocolate chip cookies and told us ragamuffin kids about the good news that King Jesus? That through His life for our life, through His death for our sins, through His resurrection for our transformation — He’d come to carry us through and save us from all the dark?
I think of it when I drive by our own neighbor’s houses:
What if I was more passionate about their salvation than concerned about my own reputation?
If we’ve found the warmth of a saving light, how can we not carry His light into others’ lives?
When I graduated with my Masters in Evangelism and Leadership from Wheaton in 2022, the work was to know the Gospel deeply, explain Jesus clearly, learn to hear people attentively and make invitations & bridges faithfully. Because the Message needs clarity, every person deserves solidarity, and Jesus is all our only liberty.
I came home to the farm, opened the book of John, and came face to face with Jesus. And I stayed there in John, lived there in John, kept company with Jesus on the pages of the book of John, walking with Him from “in the beginning was the Word…” straight through the Cross and the empty tomb and the fullest life we all long to discover.
I couldn’t not write about how being with Jesus in the book of John was this intimate, transformative experience of being Loved to Life.
“If we’ve found the warmth of a saving light, how can we not carry His light into others’ lives? “
You know what happens when you enter into the pages of John?
You discover what may be one of the very greatest of Jesus’ miracles ever. I thought it was the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. Or maybe healing the official’s dying son by just His word, without even going to him?
But maybe Jesus’ greatest miracle ever was actually His first ever recorded miracle:
At the wedding in Cana – Jesus made wine without the vine.
When Jesus raised Lazarus – He returned life to the substance of Lazarus’ body. When Jesus took the little boy’s loaves, He multiplied the substance of the bread. But water into wine is like the miracle of creation:
Why the miracle of Cana particularly matters is that Jesus changed one matter into an entirely different matter.
At Cana, Jesus does more than restore what is lost, or multiply what is little: He makes what already is, become something different entirely.
Like the early theologian, Hilary of Poitiers (c. 310-367) in On the Trinity, wrote: “It was not a mixing; it was a creation, and a creation which was not a beginning, but a transformation.”
Which is exactly what that early preacher, John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) said Jesus does for each of us:
“At that time, then, Jesus made of water, wine, and… then, and now, He ceases not to change our weak and unstable wills. For there are, yes, there are men who, in nothing, differ from water, so cold, and weak, and unsettled. But let us bring those of such disposition to the Lord, that He may change their will to the quality of wine….”
Like Jesus completely transformed the matter of water into wine, only Jesus can transform the matter of our souls into what is sanctified and whole.
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Like Jesus completely transformed the matter of water into wine, only Jesus can transform the matter of our souls into what is sanctified and whole.
Jesus’ first miracle is His greatest miracle, and like the miracle He does in each of us.
Like Jesus makes wine without grapes, so Jesus makes us like Him, only by Grace.
How could we ever keep this news to ourselves of Who can wholly change a soul?
If we really know our own belovedness, how can we not really long to share the love of the Beloved?
“If we really know our own belovedness, how can we not really long to share the love of the Beloved? “
It’s always about this time of year, when I start to think about how I am going to share the Good News of Jesus with our neighbors over the holidays.
How can the Christmas holidays be a way to give our neighbors the gift of the best news, the gift of the whole story of Jesus? Right from the very beginning – straight through to the miraculous empty tomb – so they can live lives that aren’t empty?
How can we reach out to the families all around us who long for light, how can we bring hope into homes that are weary with the weight of this world?
How can we give them The Greatest Gift – that they too can encounter Jesus and be Loved to Life?
That’s the gift I needed most as a kid.
This question came up last week during a podcast interview with Carey and Toni Nieuwhof, a roundtable conversation they were graciously hosting with John Ortberg and I, and Carey asked around the table, “What would you be if you weren’t a Christian?”
As Carey and John conferred, debated, volleyed ideas back and forth about what it means to be agnostics or humanists or deists – I sat quietly, thinking of what life was like for me as a kid in an aching, hurting home, without the life of Christ.
“What if I had never tasted the wine of His cup, life-blood of heaven’s holy veins shed for me, and how swallowing down the heat of communion tastes like the sweetness of utter relief?“
And I try to imagine:
What if Jesus hadn’t come and had just left all of us here on our own, all alone? What if I had never tasted the wine of His cup, life-blood of heaven’s holy veins shed for me, and how swallowing down the heat of communion tastes like the sweetness of utter relief?
I could weep.
What if the dark, clammy, interior caverns of my heart had never felt the warming light of His smile, the lightening of all my dark?
What if I had spent my whole life looking, scanning, searching – and never turned and looked into the face of Love looking for me, looking out for me, looking over me?
Carey then turned to me and asked, “Ann, if you weren’t a Christian, what do you think you’d be?”
And all this love brims liquid, and there’s no blinking it back, and my voice quakes with this heart-shifting love:
“I just think if I wasn’t a Christian… I don’t think I would even be…”
I swallow hard, all this aching gratefulness…. and the gift of Jesus and a burning love like this tastes like the sweetest wine.
You don’t know what keeps your neighbors awake at night. But you can share the hope that holds you through yours:
Give the Gift of The Whole Love-Story of Jesus
Give the Christmas gift to your neighbors & friends that walks them through Christmas, and right up to Easter, so they experience of the whole love-story of Jesus from the manger to the empty tomb and resurrection life!
Add a handwritten note, tie up with a bow. Let these books & Jesus on every page, be the beginning of your care for your neighbors this Christmas!
Offered with a personal note, and a friendship you keep showing up for, these two books — that tell the whole love-story of Jesus — make room for a neighbor to encounter a God who comes close to suffering, who welcomes their questions, who loves them right where they are. You can’t know every ache behind the door next to yours. But you can learn their name, listen to their story, and offer a little light to read by this Christmas.
With a brand new hardcover deluxe edition, and exquisite artwork throughout, The Greatest Gift is this rare doorway of 25 daily Advent readings that truly make Him room, slow down the whirl of the Christmas season, and make gracious space for the wonder and awe of the sweeping story of God’s love.
And with 25 free ornaments to download & hang on a tree so that your Christmas tells the whole love story of the Gospel, so that you touch & hold & hang & actually enter in & experience the awe of Christmas again like you did as a child.
Because ultimately?
We “don’t want a Christmas we have to buy. Or a Christmas we have to make, or perfect, or perform. What we all want is a Christmas we can hold. A Christmas that holds us, remakes us, revives us. We want a Christmas that whispers in awe and wonder: Jesus.”
So come Christmas morning — you haven’t missed Him, but unwrapped the Greatest Gift you’ve always yearned for — more of Him.
