When I run my hands across the carved wood of the doors, the surrendered wood, you can feel the engraving of time and hopes and fears, how they make their way into the crevices, run into the lowest places.
Turns out that when God comes to this sod, visits this planet, He doesn’t come the expected way: God doesn’t enter our lives through the most esteemed place — but through the most accessible place….
...when you bend low through that door and you kneel down and touch the place where the Maker of the Heavens delivered Himself into earth, where the Creator of the Cosmos birthed Himself as a creature…
...You’re crushed by unfathomable grace.
God is with us.
God was one of us.
God walked this sod, pressed His holy heel into the earth, let His divinity fill a container of skin and filled His lungs with all our atmosphere of ache.
We aren’t alone in this mess. Us on this pale blue dot of a planet in the vast blackness of the cosmos — we are the visited planet. He came. He sees. He knows. We are not alone. God is with us.
...This busted-up, warring world will taste resurrection, not because of people stepping up in front of news cameras or spotlights or spout their soundbites — but because of people who step down into the shadows to be the light of Christ.
This bleeding, broken planet will taste healing not because more of us tried to climb ladders to be seen — but more of us went lower and saw the face of Christ in those who are too often unseen.
In the sanctuary Ann comes into contact with a woman mopping the floors of the church:
And here is this exquisite woman with her bent back and humble mop in the place where God first touched this sod, first let his loud cry mingle with humanity.Read more and see Ann's photos here.
And I’m a kneeled mess and can’t stop weeping, my shoulders moving with the breaking of my heart over the beauty and rightness of her lowly offering right where He Himself came low and offered Himself.
The woman leans her mop up against a pew.
She steps in close toward me. And she cups my face in her wrinkled, warm hands.
And she gently kisses my one wet cheek — and on my other wet cheek.
There’s hope in our hells when we become like Jesus to each other.
I don’t understand the thickness of the foreign words she murmurs over me, but I know how this communion makes me feel, and she holds me up as my repentance breaks right open and falls like rain.
She’s like my Mary who kisses the unlikely with this fragrance of His love —
anointing me for my own going lower and dying.
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