Today is Ephiphany, or Three King's Day, an appropriate day to conclude our series Magi-cal Journey and enter the new season of growth and change on our own journeys with Christ.
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It’s in this shabby room, where the light was glowing not from the outside, but as it were from the inside… that the tired travelers finally reached their destination.
But the destination wasn’t the place. It was the Person!
They looked around and nothing was as they had imagined. The man, the woman (really just a girl) and the Baby. Nothing, nothing at all was like they imagined it would be.
And yet, in the heart of their hearts, in the marrow of their bones, they knew that that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.
They all got wobbly in their knees, fell prostrate on the dirt floor and worshiped Him.
Then, they remembered something, and scrambled up and scuttled around, until their trembling fingers held the gifts they have brought along...the strange shower of gifts for a newborn. The gold, the frankincense and the strangest of all, the myrrh… suddenly made perfect sense in this shabby room where God chose to dwell.
The bitterness intermingled with the sweetness.
The healing bleeding out of the wounds…?
The life being birthed… out of … death???
They didn’t… they couldn’t pretend to understand. Their brilliant minds, and even their adoring hearts, too tiny, too limited to contain such a mystery. And yet, just being next to Him put both their minds and their hearts at rest.
Tired from their journey, and from the overwhelming marvel of the Word of God Himself wrapped snug in the swaddling cloths of a whimpering baby, they did the next most natural thing we humans do when we reach our limits, when we are get exhausted and worn out. They fell asleep.
And having been warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod, the magi left for their own country by another way. Matthew 2:12
They returned to their own country by another way. On the outside, they might have looked the same… but, on the inside they were changed… changed by the journey, changed by the Baby who will grow up into those strange gifts to become the Prophet, the Priest and the King… The Baby who was born to become the Lamb of God, the perfect Lamb who alone gives the gift of Life – true eternal Life to all.
It was the dawn of a new day.
This post is the ninth and the final installment in the Magi-cal Journey series.
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