Welcome to 2007

Well, another new years has come & I'm (again), celebrating by staying up late in my parent's basement alone & typing random stuff. Seems to be the standard new year's eve celebration for me, so yeah, guess I shouldn't break tradition, eh?

Been a decent break. Great time with niece & nephew & brothers, sister-in-law & mom & dad. Sorry to see the kids & their mom & dad leave on Friday, but yeah.... Have been up & down & randomly grumpy (along with the rest of the family) since then, but again, likely par for the course.

Still have to decide on what job I'll be moving into in the new year. Have the option of 5 different positions I could step into in the company. Have it (I think) narrowed down to 2 & keep waffling between the two. I should try to decide for Tuesday AM. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is when I'm still hoping to figure out an exit strategy to (maybe) move me out of this company into something closer to where my heart's at....

Haven't had/takend time to read or plan our life as much as I maybe should have. Only thing I've really read through is the 'V for Vendetta" graphic novel which has sort of messed with my head & left me with questions about order vs. anarchy & internal freedom vs. freedoms in society & what true liberty is (the graphic novel is a little creepier than the movie, though still much the same story). The holiday has been spent mostly hanging out with family, playing with the kids & playing games. Have spent a chunk of time painting/customizing G.I. Joe figures & have made good progress on completing a number of projects that have been on the go for a while. It's lame, but the painting/planning has been kind of fun & sort of relaxing (though spent a chunk of time today fighting with one eye trying to get it right - still not totally happy with it, but I don't care anymore). It's a creative outlet, so guess that's a good thing to feed the creative side & keep it from starving.

Not sure what the new year holds. There are changes coming in the wind. I need to spend more time with community. This past year, I've kept a really tight circle of friends - there's been like maybe 3-7 people in my 'inner circle'. It's been good & they're a good inner circle, but I'm maybe a bit too dependant on them (or maybe I just feel like I'm clingy). Anyhow, I feel like I need to open myself up to a greater community & so I'm hoping to see if the [um] (urban monastery) people will take me in & let me be a closer part of their community.

I think I'll also start volunteering again with a ministry through the church I'm at. It's serving meals to single moms & yeah, it might be a good way to break my 'fast' from 'ministry' stuff. For me, it'll be a bit like an alcoholic going back to the bar; the 'saviour complex' will try to take over again & I'll have to try to keep in in check (or ask some good friends for help to remind me who I am).

But I'm sure there is a lot more to come. I'm expectant for the year ahead, which hasn't happened in a while. Most times new years is just another day that feels the same as the last year. This year is different perhaps just that I'm determined to change the rut I'm in & the above changes are a start of hopefully more changes to come. I need to figure out the whole what makes me feel 'alive' stuff & start doing that more. Mind you I keep talking about that & not doing much about it. But maybe I just take longer than others. I went to Ireland in 1997 & thought, 'man, I need to slow my life down' & I think it took until 2002 for that to happen. Hopefully I can make changes quicker than that in the future, but at least stuff is getting changed......

Heard sermons today on Joshua 3:4 about Israel crossing Jordan & that they were supposed to follow the priests bearing the ark of the covenant (the symbol of God's presence) & keep a long distance (2000 cubits = approx. 3000 feet) away from it & God tells them to "come not near unto it [the ark], that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed [this] way heretofore."

Have heard this used as a new year's message before, but have never understood the space thing (i.e. stay this far away from the ark). Did a quick search in an online concordance & the only other place that "two thousand cubits" is mentioned (that I could find quickly) is in Numbers 35:5 which says that the suburbs of the towns given to the Levites (the priestly tribe) would extend 2000 cubits from the outside of the cities (this would include the cities of refuge). Not sure exactly the relevance of that (if there is any) but again, it's this idea of somehow camping out by some representative of God's presence, though still far enough away that you can't quite see it, but almost (3000 feet is like 100 football fields - somewhere around a kilometer).

Anyhow, one thing that I did think about was that all through the time from leaving Egypt until Jordan, the Israelites were led by the pillar of cloud/fire. Once they crossed Jordan, crossed into the land of 'rest' (see Hebrews 3 & 4 - which I've been thinking about lately & hoping to post something on eventually), they were no longer led by the pillar. It was more following God with a less visible presence.

If you follow this history of the Jewish people, there is a progression from infancy (God meets with Abraham & deals with him as the father of a nation; this is the place where God births the nation of Israel through Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. Throughout this time, God reveals Himself to them by the name 'God almighty'; El Shaddai, the all-sufficient God. The word Shaddai has the root 'shad' which is the hebrew word for a mother's breast. And so the metaphor, the name that God uses here is a very tender, gentle, nuturuing (feminine) imagery. A mother/parent taking care of an infant child).

Later, in Egypt, there is an adolescent phase. God introduces himself to Moses as Yahweh, Jehovah, "I AM THAT I AM" & with a mighty hand leads Israel out of Egypt & into the wilderness. This is where Israel really begins to be a nation & also is a real rebellious phase.

Jordan, could, in some senses become another place of maturing. A place of where the visible manifestation of God's presence is less obvious. Where miracles are maybe harder to come by, but are there when you least expect them. Faith starts to come into play (maybe) more because there is less 'seen' & more 'hoped for'.

In the church, there is maybe similar metaphors. When Jesus was present on earth, there are places of infancy (Jesus mentions to Peter that on this rock (the revelation that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God), Jesus will build his church) & adolesence. the ascencion of Christ (going into heaven) Pentecost maybe could parallel Jordan in that the visible presence of God (in this case Jesus) disappears & people are left to find the miraculous in the unexpected places....

But all in all, there is this progression from servanthood from sonship/daughterhood - of where things change from God making all the decisions & we just try to do exactly as He says, to sort of a more abstract thing where God says, 'you are my son/daughter who I indwell & guide. You are mature & responsible & I am teaching you to rule like me, love like me." We enter this partnership with God where He almost turns to us & says "so what do you want to do?"

It's an odd place 'cause you still want to do what God wants, but He sort of leaves the choices a bit more in your court. Ultimately there is the reality that any choice will be 'right' in the sense that God will work with it to bring good & His glory, but there is a place of where we are being trained to learned to trust the indwelling Christ - to listen to the Son that lives in us, to the Spirit of God which pumps through our veins & heart & spirit & everything... we are learning to live & act as Jesus, to allow Jesus to live His life through us, but it's just not as simple as hearing "do this" or "do that".....

...anyhow, that's where it feels like I'm at still, learning how to be a son, learning maturity & it'll be a year full of those kind of choices.

nite.

...one cookie at a time

I awoke from my afternoon nap today after troubling dreams brought on likely from another family blowout over differing opinions of America's current foreign policy. In awaking, my thoughts were somehow brought to the idea of "saving the world one cookie at a time"..

The thought comes from the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with Will Farrell. Highly recommend the movie. Fantastic story & just fantastic thoughts awakened throughout the entire movie. Can't recommend it highly enough. In part of the movie, Ana tells the protagonist Mr. Crick about how she started out trying to get a law degree to help fight for various causes. During her time in school she was part of a study group & started bringing cookies to the meeting. Over the course of time, the study group grew & grew because of those cookies & she ended up dropping out of school & became a baker in order to keep baking cookies for people.

The movie does such a better job of telling this that I am currently, but the moral of it is that she ended up affecting more lives through the simple things of giving people cookies to eat instead of doing the 'big', 'important' lawyer things.

In our judging/discerning America's role in the world; government's role in the world, we have to remember that people are people. Some are good, some are bad. Most of us are a mixture of both. Some of us come with great intentions, some with not so great intentions. Sometimes it's the good intentioned people who do the most damage. Sometimes we want to do good things, sometimes we want to do bad things. Sometimes we just don't care. And sometimes it is that apathy that is the most evil thing we do.

Governments are run by people. They are people who want to make a difference. People who want to get power. People who are looking to fill a void in their lives. People who have nothing better to do. People who are pushed there by others. People who fight there way there for a reason. At the end of the day, everyone does things out of some motivation that is, in some semblance, looking out for their own interests. This can lead to positive change, or negative change depending on whether or not you agree, or fall in line with, the interests of those wanting to make the changes.

The whole "changing the world one cookie at a time" thing is much like Jesus's idea of giving a cup of cold water in His name. Often we make a difference by making other's happiness our interests - not by changing the way they live, but by offering them little tokens of human kindness.

Holiday blues//Capacity for Love

I've been feeling sort of depressed over the last few days.

Perhaps depressed is the wrong word. Melancholy, bummed, out of sorts... everything's been tinged with an edge of unhappiness.

Haven't been able to get to the bottom of the why's. Maybe it's the average Christmas blues. Maybe it is the sense of connection/non-connection with family. The moments of being close in proximity to people, but maybe not so close in communication, point of view, etc. (mind you I haven't been talking that much so far, so that's likely part of it).

There's been other things, too. The niece & nephew are home for Christmas (along with their parents of course). The nephew is brand new & the niece I haven't seen since March. In these family gatherings I end up being the unofficial photographer. Part of it is just that I have a decent camera. Part's just that I remember to pick up the camera & snap away. But a lot of it is maybe just the storyteller heart coming out. Like a scribe, I end up chronicling our family gathering from behind the lens, taking stills & videos of each event; significant or insignificant. This chronicling comes partly from the desire to save the moment, to provide a history to hold on to for the times that we as a family are away from each other. The photographs only remind us of those we miss & never replace the gift of actual presence, but they do help hold you over for a bit until you can be with those you love again. Partly, too, the chronicling comes form my desire to 'bear witness' to these lives around me that matter to me. One could argue that to truly 'bear witness' I should put down the camera & interact better with my family, & I do that, too (sometimes - sometimes the distance behind the camera provides a safe buffer zone).

But in the middle of the chronicling, other thoughts have crept in. Some are good; like the thought that maybe some of these pictures will make it into a slide show at Elyssia's (my niece) wedding some day far in the future; shots showing what a cute, joy-bringing bundle of energy, imagination & laughter that she is/was. Other thoughts are not so good. Once or twice I've had the fleeting thought while video-ing my dad holding Garrison, my nephew, that these could be the last images of my dad that I could be holding on to. This I think is residuals from last years Christmas where we spent a lot of time with Dad in the hospital as he was dealing with heart problems. Dad's fine & bound to live a long, long time to come, but the fears are still there for me. I made it through last Christmas/New Years & stayed pretty strong for the family, but it all ate away at me. I'm not sure what I'd do if I lost my dad. It would crumble me... like waves devouring a sand-castle.... it would feel like my life would totally lose structure....

....and so perhaps part of the depression is standing around amongst people you love, but don't fully 'know', people who, like me, are not the best communicators & you can't really express things.... and yeah, really you can't ever express what your heart wants to say. You can say "I love you", but that seems to not mean so much. You can pour out yourself in gifts, in acts of kindness, in time, in whatever way you can & somehow it's never enough to express the depths of how much this person matters to you or how you hope you matter to them, too.....

In a similar vein, I've found that it's maybe love that's adding to this sense of depression. I've noticed I have spent more of the early parts of the holidays with Elyssia & have ignored Garrison a bit more. Elyssia's two & full of life (she's been nicknamed "the energizer bunny" around here 'cause she never stops). Her giggles are infectious and it's great to be able to play with her. She's old enough that I can mostly understand what she's saying & life is about playing or colouring or seeing Preston's gerbils or the kitties outside or just being silly. Garrison on the other hand is 6 weeks old & he sort of lays there & cries & gurgles & wiggles.... With Elyssia's first Christmas, she was the first grandkid in our family & so it was easy to lavish attention on her. Now it seems odd to split my heart & time to welcome in this new life.

Recognizing this, I've tried to spend more time with Garrison. He's been colicky & having problems & so I've taken to kind of holding him & walking around with him, either laying his back against my chest & holding him there so he can look around as I walk, taking in the world around him, or laying him face down on my chest, head turned out, face snuggled against my neck or looking out over my shoulder. A couple of times that I've done this over the last couple of days he's fallen asleep in my arms & I've ended up moving to just sit on the couch & let him sleep resting on my chest.

There's a story in the new testament where this woman with an 'issue of blood' touches Jesus's clothes in the middle of some crowd that's nearly smothering him. In the story, Jesus stops in the middle of the procession & goes, "Wait, someone's touched me, I can sense that virtue has gone from me".

I think I'm catching glimpses of what he meant. When I finally lay Garrison in his crib to let him sleep, I feel utterly drained. I feel like something has gone from me; some part of me has left me & been given to this little child. And I guess ultimately it's that somehow another piece of my heart is going out to this little one & he'll hold it with him for as long as he lives. Even as Elyssia, the other members of my family, & each of those people that I am lucky enough to call friend have a part of my heart for as long as they live (& beyond).

In Mike Mason's "The Mystery of Marriage", he has a chapter dedicated to the subject of "death" in marriage. In it he talks about the idea of "eulogizing the living", of living in the constant reality of our finiteness & living to say in the perpetual now the words of love that we so often neglect to say until after the beloved is gone. With this he also talks about how marriage in specific, but love in general, makes us more & more vulnerable to the effects of death. When we are alone & don't love anyone, we only fear for our own life. But with each new person that we love, we have to realize that they too are vulnerable to death's sting & with this, we realize that our hearts can be so easily broken as love spreads our heart into more & more pieces as we love more & more people. But, if I remember right, he talks about how much this is part of the bravery of love, the bravery of life that we gladly choose to risk love, risk loss, for the sake of the ones we love. Our love for them moves us from our selfishness to want to only worry about ourselves.

And so, again, I don't know fully this odd sense I have in my heart. Part of it's fear, maybe most of it's love. It's funny how that love can break you open... I wonder how much capacity the human heart has for love? Just how much love can one human hold? It seems that the heart has the capacity to grow & grow (sort of like the Grinch's heart), that somehow there is always room for the heart to swell with an ever increasing capacity to love; but sometimes it's the stretching that seems to hurt - like the chest cavity is going to explode under the pressure...

The armour of identity

I have my doubts that any of us truly 'see' who we really are. Most of us struggle with our sense of identity, our sense of being & try desperately to create some fabricated view of ourselves, part truth, part illusion. We wear this man made identity like a suit of armour, trying to protect the fragile heart just behind the facade.

But if we could really see ourselves, we'd likely learn two things:

One, we would learn of our insignificance, that we are but dust. That on the cosmic scale our lives are just a hiccup against the vast melody of time & history. We exist for a moment & then vanish like the morning mist. No matter how much greatness, wealth, fame, popularity, power, all the things the world chases after, that we achieve, we will still be forgotten in the pages of history & our life will be forgotten. If we're lucky, we'll leave ripples - subtle effects on other's lives - & we need to pay attention to the ripples & what causes them, but at the end of the day, that's about it. We are stones cast into the endless ocean of time....

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly (especially in light of our insignificance), is that we would learn just how incredibly significant we are because we are infinitely loved. Most of us exist with no idea of the depth from which we are loved. The heart of God is an eternal wellspring whose depths are unfathomable, deeper than any of us could ever know or explore. And it is this wellspring from which love flows from Him to us, from Him to others to us. Somewhere in creation we are made unique, single, one of a kind masterpieces that will never be copied and in this, there is a part of our Creator's heart that is uniquely knitted to each of us. Each of us in uniquely & infinitely treasured by Him & sometimes, if we're lucky, He lets us really see another person & see the true shining brilliance of who they really are, washed clean & spotless in His love.....

.... and it is these two things that balance us out. One or the other alone perhaps would leave us skewed as people. The sense of finiteness brings us humility. The sense of being infinitely loved brings us wholeness. Knowing that we are infinitely loved sets us free from all of our striving to 'be', striving to earn an identity, to earn love from someone. At the core of our hearts, we are all children looking for someone to notice us, to 'see' us, to embrace us in our best & our worst. And it is that sense of being infinitely loved that satisfies that longing in our souls, that tells us our lives are noticed, that our unique quirky selves are loved not for what we do, but for who we are. This gives our hearts a new armour - we can throw away the patchwork armour of our deeds & accomplishments & leave our hearts completely open & unguarded, naked & without shame, to the world around us. We can do this only because our hearts are now clothed in light, wrapped in a reality that we are loved regardless of the opinions of others. It is from this new center, the recognition of how deeply we are loved, that we become free to truly live & to live a life abundant because we start to live out of who we really are instead of living out of who we think others want us to be....

The spirit by which we cry "Abba, Father"

Had some odd dream this morning about rollerblading through shopping malls/wal-mart as some sort of corportate team building excerise & I somehow lost my rollerblades & was trying to find them in various rental skate cases where the skates looked more like vacuum cleaners.... (no, I am not on crack).

This sort of left me in a half awake state & I was brought to full alertness by hearing my niece in the next room awake with a screech calling out for "Daddy!!!" (guess her dreams were worse than mine)

This made me think about the verses in, I believe Romans 8, where it talks about us the spirit of adoption in us which cries out, "Abba, Father" "daddy" to God. Often times I think this crying for our 'Daddy' comes in the good moments, in the moments where we somehow realize just how deeply we're loved & our heart confesses some great spiritual reality that our spirit is awaking to....

...but I am reminded today that this cry for "Daddy" is perhaps even more real, more relevant in our lives when it's in the middle of the dark night, in strange places, where we feel all alone & the shadows of our dreams leave us clouded with terror.

Us & Them

I don't want to be a "them".... I just want to be an "us"....

The message of Christmas

Heard a preacher on the radio tonight railing about the true message of Christmas & asking the question that if some foreigner or alien arrived in our north american culture & beheld the spectacle/car-crash that is our modern day Christmas, if they'd really hear the true message of Christmas. He talked about how the problem is that we don't think about Jesus enough during Christmas & instead worry about the holidays & the gifts & stuff....

... got me to thinking about how Christmas is maybe not so significant for me. The part I love about Christmas is that it gives me an excuse to buy gifts for family & friends. Yeah, I turn myself into a stress case worrying about finding the 'perfect' gift, but I love those rare moments where I can find something for someone that they can really use, or that they really want - most of all I want to find them something that makes them feel 'known' - like someone's listened to them throughout the year (& the stress/not knowing the perfect gift maybe shows that i don't listen as well as I'd like to).

But for me in my addled little brain, the reality of Jesus is a year round thing. He is the presence that never leaves, whether I'm aware of it or not. He is the unexpected voice, the one who heralds the unknown & gleefully beckons me to join Him in braving it. He is the lover, the saviour, the friend. & so the incredible message of Christmas, of Emmanuel, of God with us, is a (near) daily event for me.

In Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", the good news of Christmas seeps into Scrooge's withered soul & makes him come alive again. In Scrooge's opus at the end of the story, he promises to keep Christmas every day in his heart. Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" in the middle of a world where the poor were treated horribly, where the rich got richer & turned away from their fellow man & lived with hearts of stone, cold to the cries of the oppressed. At the core of Dickens' message was a message that the power of Christmas, the reality of "glad tidings which shall be to all people", was that this revelation of love should affect us permanently, should guide our actions & motives every moment of every day.

Maybe the problem isn't in whether or not we "keep the Christ in Christmas". Maybe the real issue is that we wait for holidays to open our hearts to the revelation of "Emmanuel". Maybe if Christianity was more relationship than lifestyle, more romance than how-to manual....

Another Hint: What I want to be when I grow up

Well, it is now currently up to five different jobs/roles that I could switch to if I want to change jobs in my company. Got hinted at that I should try to decide which one to pick before coming back in Jan. Was told that I should probably figure out "what I want to be when I grow up".....

....so what is that? What do I want to be when I grow up? Well, I'd like to be a husband, maybe a father. I'd like to be kind, be loving, be generous, be thankful, be wise. I'd like to be someone who lives life to the full, who enjoys the richness of good moments, good friendships & all the very best that life has to offer. I'd like to be someone who breathes deep & feels rich in love & rich in life. I'd like to be a healer, a lover, a warrior, a sherpherd. I'd like to be someone that helps restore dignity & hope to people, someone who helps bring freedom to people in chains, hope to those who've lost it. I want to be someone who can weep with those who grieve, laugh with those who rejoice, dance & sing with wild abandon at the craziness, futility, beauty & eloquence of life.... I'd like to be a writer, a poet, a student of beauty.....

Maybe I'd like to be a patriarch. Maybe a saint. Maybe I'd like to be someone who helps remove poverty from some part of the globe. maybe I'd like to be someone who helps fix the problems in Africa, or in other failing places in the world.....

Maybe deep down when I grow up I want to be Jesus - or at least someone who looks like Him, LOVES like Him....

So I wonder if the company has a job description that entails that?! Or if any company has the above as a job description? (and, on the flip side, if any place did, would I be have the balls to actually take that job instead of sticking with the status quo).

Letters to Angels: the genealogy of Jesus

Ah, the observation about Jesus & his 'bloodline'. Brilliant. Not too many people catch this &, while it seems like a minor detail it has huge ramifications to the overall story.

OK, so here's the scoop (from my perspective):

If you want to start way back, you go all the way back to Genesis 49 where Jacob/Israel is blessing his sons. His blessing/prophesy over Judah is this (see verses 8-12):

"Judah, thou [art he] whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand [shall be] in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down before thee. Judah [is] a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him [shall] the gathering of the people [be]. Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes: His eyes [shall be] red with wine, and his teeth white with milk. "

So right from the beginning, it's the plan that the kingly line (i.e. the sceptre - the symbol of ruling authority) in Israel comes from the tribe of Judah . Wrapped up in this promise is the idea of an everlasting kingship - that the sceptre/kingship won't depart from Judah until "Shiloh" (which I think means "Peace", or "Peace bringer" or "the one who is peace") comes.

This begins to be fulfilled through David when he takes the throne. In the middle of David's reign he wants to build God a temple & God makes the promise with him that, while David won't build God a temple, God will give him a son that will build him a temple & promises that He will give David a perpetual kingdom, that there will always be a son of David ruling on the throne. ( see 2 Samuel 7:1-17; 1 Chronicles 17:1-15).

This covenant, this promise, gets repeated & re-emphasized in a lot of places. Examples of this are as follows:


1Kings 8:25; 2 Chronicles 6:16: Therefore now, LORD God of Israel, keep with thy servant David my father that thou promisedst him, saying, There shall not fail thee a man in my sight to sit on the throne of Israel; so that thy children take heed to their way, that they walk before me as thou hast walked before me.

1 Kings 9:5; 2 Chronicles 7:18: Then I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father, saying, There shall not fail thee a man upon the throne of Israel.

Psalms 89:3&4, 132:11

Jeremiah 33:17; 20, 21: For thus saith the LORD; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; ......Thus saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; [Then] may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers.


and there's a number of places where the idea of idea of this everlasting kingdom, that the son of David will rule forever, is prophesied to be fulfilled by the Messiah (e.g. Isaiah 9:7, Micah 5:2, Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15; Zechariah 3:8, 6:12 (The BRANCH). Isaiah 11:10; Revelations 5:5, 22:16 (the Root)) & this is seen in that in Jesus' time, the Jews are expecting the Messiah to be the son of David, the next in the ruling line (see John 7: 40-43)

But, & here's where it get's interesting. There's a bit of a glitch in the program. If you're going through the genealogy in Matthew, you hit verse 11 where it mentions this guy "Jechoniah" who is the last king on the throne before Judah is taken into captivity by the Babylonians.

Little known fact about this guy: the dude was really bad, really wicked - beyond all the wickedness of the other kings before him & so somewhere along the way, God is completely fed up with this guy & speaks a curse over him through the prophet Jeremiah

Jeremiah 22:28-30: [Is] this man Coniah a despised broken idol? [is he] a vessel wherein [is] no pleasure? wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not? O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man [that] shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

"Coniah" is a shortened form of Jechoniah (just for clarity). But God basically says that none of this man's descendants will ever sit on the throne of David.

& so you have a problem here. God's promised to David that there will always be a direct descendant of David sitting on the throne. Now with Jeconiah, God's saying that no one from this guy's descendants will ever sit on the throne. So God's made this huge everlasting covenant with David, but seems to break it with Jechoniah. And there are all these promises about the Messiah being the 'seed of David' & it looks like those prophesies are at risk, too.

Hence this is why Jesus gets two genealogy (three if you count John 1: 1&2) tracing his heritage. In Matthew 1, Matthew, being a Jew & very concerned about writing of Jesus as the Lion (Ezekiel 1:10, 10:14, Rev 4:7), the king of Israel, he documents the kingly line through David, through Solomon, through Jeconiah & his children all the way down to Joseph. Now, this is the King's bloodline, the line through which is held the legal right to the throne of David. If Israel was free, was a nation ruling itself, (if Jechoniah hadn't been cursed), then Joseph would be heir to the throne of David & this title would've been passed on to Jesus as Joseph's firstborn son. Legally, even though Joseph was technically not the father of Jesus, the title of King, of "seed of David" would have gone to Jesus because Joseph was his legal father.....

But then we go to the 2nd genealogy in Luke 3. Luke is a doctor & writes about Jesus's humanity, about Jesus as a man, & he ends up tracing here, the genealogy of Mary. At first glance the genealogy here looks like it's tracing Joseph's roots & is a copy of the genealogy in Matthew 1, but it's not. If you look closely, it traces back through very different lines &, as you get to verse 31, you see that this lineage comes through "Nathan the son of David the son of Jesse" - so through Mary, Jesus is still, by birth the "seed of David", but he traces his roots through a line different than that of Solomon, different than that of the cursed line of Jechnoiah.

In Jewish culture, it's the mother's line that traces your heredity. If your father was a Jew & your mother a goyim (gentile), you wouldn't be a jew. But if your mother was Jewish & your father a gentile, youl were still considered to be a full fledged Jew. So in this case, the legal right to the throne of David comes through Jesus' surrogate father Joseph, but because Jesus is not the direct descendant of Joseph, the curse placed on Jechoniah & his seed doesn't apply. Because Jesus is born of Mary, he is fully descended from the bloodline of David & is completely a "Seed/offspring of David".

So this is the complexity of it all & why the genealogies are included in Matthew & in Luke (& the passage in John basically is where John is looking at Jesus as God, as the eagle, & so his genealogy is that Jesus was "in the beginning with God & was God"). This is one of those areas that people will often gloss over & won't catch the complexity of the whole thing & all the hoops God had to sort of jump through to fulfil these prophesies. It points out how God chose Joseph & Mary specifically to be Jesus's parents & so it points out how crucial we can be to His story (though on the flip side, if you look at Jechoniah, it can also show that God will work around people that are getting in the way of His story, too).

Another Hint

"Oh, but I feel at home here. They're my friends. Beside, one never knows what joy one might find amongst the unwanted.... and abandoned"

- Lola/Simon, "Kinky Boots"

"Maybe you judge what you leave behind by what you inspire in other people."

- Nicola, "Kinky Boots"

The Nature of Love: Manger, Cross & Empty Tomb

....there is a certain aspect where the story of love in each of our lives will involve the manger, the cross & the empty tomb, the same as it did with the story of the embodiment of Love.....

Love comes with the manger in that it comes unexpectedly, not in the time or place that you would've planned. It comes often humbly, sometimes unnoticed & without fanfare, like one more homeless couple with no place to stay. Other times it comes with angel choirs. But mostly it appears subtly, but with a sense that it will somehow turn your life upside down.

Love comes with the cross in that love will always bring us to the place of sacrifice, to the place of the glad surrender where we lay down our lives, our everything, for the sake of the beloved. We find that this is done willingly, where it is love that holds us to the cross, to the place of sacrifice. Love comes often with pain, often with it's own torture, but we endure it because of the hope for what is beyond.... the 'joy set before' us....

And love comes with the empty tomb in that there is a place beyond the sacrifice, beyond the pain, where it is so much better, so much more incredible than you could've ever hoped for, ever dreamed of.... eye has not seen, nor ear heard.... Love brings resurrection, life from the dead, life abundant & fuller than you could have thought possible.... Love brings hope & freedom & joy immeasurable, so much so that the loss, the pain of the cross is forgotten, swallowed up in the joy of union with the beloved.