What's Inside the Box?

If Christian life is a life of God's boundless unmerited favor and love towards all the undeserving, a life of GRACE - God’s Riches At Christ Expense - sooner or later most of us start to scratch our heads what this really means.

How does this translate into an ordinary Tuesday or Thursday or even a weekend or a holiday?

Where is love in the tsunamis, in the school shootings, church and abortion clinic bombings... where is love in endless days of depression, anxiety... in divorce? In a suicide? When the murky floods and mudslides are raging all around and on the inside... but no ark in sight?

Continuing on with the ‘candy’ box’ analogy, we begin to ask ourselves what is really inside that box.  The lid is off, the box is open, I reach in fully expecting – in faith – that I will get what I asked for… but what I get instead is an unwanted surprise at best…

Some days it’s a devastating blow… Like we remember today the Boston Marathon explosion exactly one year ago…

Other days, I reach in… and keep groping and scraping, grasping and grappling… but come out with nothing… nada... nista... nicht... like a child who found an empty plastic Easter egg, I go away, confused and empty-handed…

It doesn’t take long to realize that our own ideas about this new life in Christ may not be what we had hoped for or anticipated. 

That being a child of God rarely implies a life of vigorous health and comfortable wealth, a life of steady stream of green lights, crossing the finish lines with bursts of joy;  a life of freedom from pain and turmoil, disappointments and doubts, all sugar and sweetness, Pinterest worthy life of beauty and harmony and peace…

Clearly this is not the sole content of the box of life... 

For life dishes us both Almond Joy and Sour Patch. Sometimes it’s the Jaw Breaker or even Toxic Waste (which, by the way, is, for some perverted reason my children’s favorite).

In Matthew 5 we find some cues as to the content of this box...something that I seem to consistently miss when I look for the cues elsewhere...