Broken Gifts with Beautiful Wrapping

During this Christmas season, we are busy with gifts.  Buying gifts, making gifts, receiving gifts.  I make chocolate-covered pretzels to share with neighbors and friends.  My dad fashions delicious sticky buns and we enjoy a perfect set of eight buns for Christmas breakfast.

Yesterday my son held two carefully-wrapped parcels of chocolate pretzels on his lap.   As I drove the car, I kept admonishing him to keep his legs still.  “Don’t drop the pretzels,” I warned.  We didn’t want to give out a gift that was broken in pieces.

In this modern world, we keep ourselves carefully, beautifully wrapped and “together.”  Yet, the very gift that God wants from us is brokenness.

“…A broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”  Psalm 51

Brokenness, too, is the daily gift that Jesus offers to us – Himself, broken for us.

“Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you.”  I Corinthians 11:24

Why does God do things so opposite of us?  Why are His ways so different from ours?  He led Abraham to begin sacrificing his beloved, miracle son on an altar.  His ways are not our ways.  What a relief when a lamb was provided instead.  But then, God  proceeded to do the very same thing.  He sacrificed His one and only beloved, miracle Son, His lamb, on a wooden, cross-shaped altar.  The Lamb of God – broken, for us.

If that wasn’t enough, He calls us to copy this sacrificial Son.  We receive His broken body in the Eucharist and in our hearts and then we are called to offer our own bodies, our own hearts, for Him to use as He chooses.  He chooses brokenness.  

Oh, how we want it to be different.  We want it easier.  We want to give a perfect package, a pretty gift, one that turns heads.  Yet we are called to be like Him:  “…despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”  Isaiah 53:3

Even these words seem broken, not quite right.  Yet, I offer them up for Him to use as He sees fit.  The same goes for my heart -- my incomplete, broken, beating heart.  He can crush it, break it, or even put a sword through it if He so chooses.  By His grace and His presence, perhaps I can say words like the Blessed Mother said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

                                             

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; 
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; 
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
  ~Christina Rosetti