Origin Story: On the Bathroom Floor

 At times, I wonder if I’m qualified to be a Christian writer.  I have no moments of addiction, no near-death crises, no dramatic rescues to form my origin story.  The story of my origin as a Christian is a little more ordinary.  My childhood church planted the seeds of faith, deep within me, in the stories and songs I learned in Sunday School and children’s choir.  Church was a close part of my life, a part of my cultural and ethnic identity as a German-American Mennonite.  So much a part of my life, that after my baptism at fourteen, I walked out of church and didn’t return for about fifteen years.  It was as if I checked that box off my list and went out to explore the rest of the world.

Exploring atheism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Unitarianism left me with a rich and varied theology.  I had the pervasive idea that if I was a good enough person, if I meditated better, if I subdued my ego, if I participated in social justice, recycled, voted for the right candidates and ate local-sustainable food, then I would be at peace.  My Christian upbringing taught me values and gave me sacred stories, but all that sin and redemption stuff didn’t matter to me.  After all, I was a good person; I sent money to Free Tibet and Heifer International.  I didn’t need to be saved.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked Jesus and all, but I didn’t need him to save me.  I had that covered; I was getting pretty good at yoga and I could chant the Jewel is on the Lotus.  I was doing just fine--well enough.

Until the day that I wasn’t good enough.   Until the day when I collapsed on my bathroom floor in tears, paralyzed by guilt and anxiety.  There was no near-death crisis here, merely an ordinary crisis of spirit, a beginning-life-crisis, if you will.  Grieving the loss of my beloved father, contemplating a risky change of career, desperate and terrified to become a mother, I had made some poor decisions.  I failed to love my neighbor (and my loved ones) as myself; I failed to love myself.  I had been brought low time and time again, only to promise to myself and my vague idea of God , “I will do better next time.  I will try more.  I will fix myself.”    Again and again, I promised myself and my God.  No matter how much I tried, I just wasn’t good enough.

In a moment of desperation, I said out loud, “I am NOT good enough.  Do you still love me?”  Ostensibly, I was speaking to my husband, but really I was crying out to myself and to my God.  The answer, to my shock, was “YES!”  Brought to my knees by my striving and my failures, I died to my ego and surrendered to the love of God in Christ.  I didn’t realize at the time that it was Jesus who answered me, but I knew I was loved, particularly, unequivocally, unreservedly.  In the midst of my ordinary sins of omission, the little lies I told myself and others, the posturing, the playing the victim, the gossiping, the every-day sins of life while I was trying to be “good”, I was LOVED!  I felt it, palpably, like a cool cloth on my heated brow, like a hand to lift me up, like a rock under my feet.

The love of Christ gave me the strength to climb up from my knees and back into my life.  The love of Christ allowed me to rest, to stop striving, and to start living, not to “be good” but to do good in the world.  Knowing I was already loved and saved, with all my sins upon me, changed me.  The peace I’d longed for came in drops of water, flowing into a stream, and building to a loving ocean.  I could live a little more honestly, speak a little more kindly, act a little more lovingly, because I was a person already resting in love.

I had missed the main point of the lesson.  I had rejected the idea that Jesus had to “fix me”, because I was sure I could take care of myself.  I missed the whole thing; that Jesus was the love that sustained me, no matter what may come or how I sinned.  I didn’t have to do anything special to find Christ, because he was always waiting for me.  I didn’t have to “take Jesus into my heart” because he was already there, just waiting for to quit doing things and to notice him. As Robert Farrar Capon says,  I didn’t have to plug in to Jesus, because he is The Light of the World, not the Lighting Company.  I just had to open up my eyes and see.

Baby JEEEsus

I don’t think that much about baby Jesus, certainly not outside of Christmas.  I like babies just fine, but it isn’t the image of the virgin birth or a baby born in a manger that brought me back to Christianity.  I came back to church during Lent; the heartbreak and healing of Good Friday and Easter brought me home all over again.  Don’t get me wrong, Christmas is great, but that's not the image I turn to in moments of trouble.

    Most of the time when people talk of Baby Jesus, I think of the immortal Ricky Bobby, of Talladega Nights, praying over a dinner of KFC and Pizza Hut to “Baby Jesus, lying in your crib, can’t even talk yet, watching your Baby Einstein DVDs, thank you for my smoking hot wife”.   Baby JEEEsus is a punchline.  I love Christmas songs and I love babies, but the God in my prayers is an adult God.

    Recently, I saw  Baby Jesus in a different light.  Perhaps the familiar story had lost it wonder--as often happens to an adult come home to the faith of her fathers.  Perhaps, as a mother of two little girls, I saw it a new perspective.  For some reason, the incarnation of God as a helpless human baby took on a new meaning suddenly.  

    No one understands the helplessness of a baby more than a new mother.  I remember holding my babies so tenderly, so carefully, so tightly, while occasional thoughts of danger and destruction flashed through my mind.  “What if I dropped her?  What if I fell down holding her?  What if the car crashed?  What if she slipped under the water in the bathtub?”  Those moments only lasted a split second; I chocked them up to new mother’s anxiety and appreciated how they made me more vigilant.  So, what does it mean that God willingly takes on that type of helplessness?  What does it mean that God allows himself to be cared for by a regular, low-class Jewish woman with a carpenter husband and a baby that isn’t his?  God sure must trust people a whole lot.

    As children grow, it’s not just the physical world that terrifies mothers.  I hope and pray that I’m making the right decisions raising my girls.  I want them to respect me, to obey me when their safety is on the line, to feel secure in their own persons, to feel loved and accepted, to test their abilities, to persevere through hardship.  I want to help them learn discipline and compassion.  I want them to know the love of a mother, so they can love others.  I want to love them into being the people they were born to be.  Some regular, low-class Jewish woman with a carpenter husband prayed for the same things for her son.  Some mother loved him into being who he became.

    Suddenly, it hit me.  The incarnation isn’t just God deigning to become human in order to teach us and to love us.  Yes, Jesus did teach us and he did love us.  But before he could do that, he was taught and he was loved--by us.  God loved the world so much that he gave his only son (John 3:16).  And someone loved that only son so much that he grew up to become all he should have been--God in flesh.  God trusted humans so much that he let us shape him, just a little bit, let us teach him how to walk, to talk, to read.  He trusted humans enough to let them love him into being one.  I know lots of people and I’m not sure I trust any of them that much.  People are pretty rotten, selfish, lazy, and annoying.  Who in his right mind would lay his life in the likes of those?  Once, again I am wrong.  That little baby trusted his parents to raise him into a man; I need to trust my fellow man to life up to his potential, too.  God loved us into being, and then he gave us the supreme gift of allowing us to love God into being, too.

    That my friends is why, this year, I, too, will pray to “Little Baby Jesus”.