Opus 2025-466: From Boxing Day to Christmas Morning

In England they have a holiday we don’t celebrate.  I believe it’s called Boxing Day.  This is not where they put on the gloves and come out swinging.  I believe it’s the day where they wrap their Christmas gifts.  It might be the beginning of the musical 12 days of Christmas.

It is the day where you take your glorious gifts that you have brought for people you love, and you put them in a box, wrap it in pretty paper, if you’re in touch with your feminine side, you have ribbons and bows, and you put it under the tree.  If you live in a house like mine you hide it in the closet because my children used to love to almost destroy the package, trying to figure out what was in it.

This is where a lot of us are when it comes to understanding or trying to understand God himself.  Let it be stated at the beginning that God is beyond our comprehension in His totality.  We are told that we can know Him through Jesus and that opens the door and gives us access.  However, as long as we are in this flesh, there are severe limitations.

My encouragement is that you take God out of the box and let Him be God.  This comes from my thinking this morning, as I am reflecting on the nature of God, and trying to understand Him, and realizing how petty my gestures are.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe He welcomes those gestures.  I believe He encourages those gestures.  The point is that we need to realize God does not fit in our box and that our attempts are gestures.  We need to take all of the preconceived notions we have about God and put them over to the side in case somebody needs them someday.  Wouldn’t it be great if we had a local thrift store that could take preconceived notions?  But I digress.

This does not mean that you just wander off into total ignorant speculation.  It means that you take literally the very clear teachings of the Bible about the character and attributes of God.  Start with the statement in John that God is love.  You can observe how repeatedly He demonstrates His patience.  You can see how He has let His wrath go.  In all of these things you build up a picture of God, but just be careful that you don’t put Him back in the box and define Him just by your chosen terms.

As I look in the morning sky and I see a star that is there on a regular basis, I picture a box around that star, and in my mind I reach out and open that box, drop it into the horizon and then sit back and allow the Holy Spirit to bring to mind what the Bible tells me about God.

We’re still a long way from Christmas Day but it’s never too early to let God out of His box.  He wasn’t in there anyway.

homo unius libri