Wednesday, November 17
Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son.
—Luke 1:30-31
NIV
There once was a man who had a dream. In his dream, God was spirit and the man was born out of God and knew he was one with God. The man was given a human form and understood he was to enjoy the love and goodness of God, and express the truth of his identity as God’s son. But something within the man wondered what it might be like to actually be God. He determined that all he lacked was the full knowledge of God. So the man added to his knowledge of good, the knowledge of evil.
The moment the man acquired this knowledge he felt separated from God. Suddenly he was in a different world experiencing something far less than the love, beauty, and goodness of God. Once feeling one with God, the man now felt as though God was a great distance away.
Lost to his true identity, the man set out in search of significance, worth, purpose, love, meaning, and goodness in the material world. He poured his energies into making things right again with God, but it was futile and only intensified his separation, shame, and fear.
It was utterly hopeless until the man saw someone named Jesus on a cross. How a man dying on a cross could do anything to help him, the man did not know. After his death, Jesus was placed inside a tomb, and later it was discovered that he had risen from the dead.
The man approached some people around the tomb and asked them where Jesus had gone. "Do you not know?” they answered. “Jesus is no longer with us." The man asked, “But where is he?”A woman stepped out and explained, "Sir, Jesus died on the cross and we shall never have Jesus again. But did you not know that he is God the Christ—the one who has come to save the world. You ask, ‘Where is he now?’ He is within you!”
This was all quite perplexing to the man. “If Christ is in me,” he said “why am I not radically and instantaneously changed?” Seeing his distress, the woman responded, "Sir, I am Mary, the mother of Jesus. Christ was conceived within me, but it was required that I give birth to him. Christ is now conceived within you, but you also now must give birth to him.” The man was all ready to launch into a whole new set of questions when he was awakened from his dream.
He was back in the real world—a world of things and endeavors, places to go, people to see, tasks to be completed, demands to be met. A sense of disappointment fell upon him. “This human world seems so tiring, and trying to squeeze God into it doesn't seem to help much,” the man thought to himself. But strangely, the words of Jesus began surfacing in his mind. "You are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me, and I am in you."
God, let the life of Christ be born anew in me this day.
These Signposts originally appeared on explorefaith in 2006.
