The Phil Files

Thought that these two vids were a good, even convicting view of time and made me ask what time it was in my own life. They couldn’t be any more different in style or focus or even accent of the narrator. One is sedate and calming — like, don’t get warped or bent on stuff, God’s got this time thing under control. The other is urgent, challenging, inviting, maybe even demanding. But together, I think, they call us to trust God is in control of our time, but we have a deep responsibility for our time in the world. So…

What about you? What time is it in your life?

The Father’s fingerprints are on me. They are also on you. In fact, despite what you may have been told, your DNA was not based on a random fertilization of your mother’s egg and your dad’s sperm. Behind their love and passion, here was a holy conspiracy to get you here! Listen to how David wrote it for us to say with the hundreds of generations who have said this Psalm as a part of their shared worship:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:13-15 NLT).

But sometimes some things are better seen than just said, so be blessed by this!

There are moments of transcendence, where everyday things and old familiar stories intersect and God comes and inhabits ordinary human flesh, mortal tissue, and brings us grace.

The birth story of Jesus is set in a broken world with flawed people with horrific backstories — that’s what Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1 tells us. And to connect with this broken world, God does the unthinkable: he enters our world in the womb of an unmarried woman and her husband to be who has to believe the impossible. “He will be called Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” — by entering the world in a woman whom everyone would think was the latest, biggest, sinner in her little town. But Joseph, with the help of an angel he was not expecting to meet, believed the impossible and did the unthinkable for a devoted and righteous God-follower in his time: he married the woman that evidence suggested had been unfaithful to him and carried the child of another. Yet Joseph believed the angel and believed that Mary carried not the child of another, but of Another conceived miraculously by the Holy Spirit.

As Fredrick Dale Bruner says, Joseph is Grace — and he adapts the U2 Bono song Grace to fit Joseph:

Grace, he takes the blame, he covers the shame, he removes the stain, it could be his name.

I personally like even better, the closing words to the song:

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

God’s ways are not our ways. God’s ways are not the religious way. So God chooses to enter our scandalous world in a scandalous way just like he will die a scandalous death so that grace would be accessible to us … all of us … each of us … and then he says that if we are really His followers, like Joseph, then we will wear the name of Grace and work to make beauty out of ugly things.

And here are Bono’s words to the song:

Grace
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name

Grace
It’s a name for a girl
It’s also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything

Grace, she’s got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She’s got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything

Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things

 

How about taking a quick pause and getting in the Christmas Spirit?

Hope you have a blessed day and that no matter how stressful, or delightfully wonderful, the day is, that your day can end up ending like this one does!