Meeting Him in the Manger

In honor of living in the woods for a month, I thought I’d share some luxurious normalities of life here in training camp:

The regular use of porta potties have been intertwined into our daily lives so deeply that the thought of flushing a toilet seems foreign. We celebrate every Monday as camp fills with fragrant smells as the porta poddies are emptied and the mountain of excrements we have to gaze at everyday disappear. 

My tent has become my little home and I couldn’t love it more, it’s my little safe haven. Apparently my tent has interrupted the presence of an ant hill, now moving all the ants onto the outside of my tent. Usually I’m so tired from the day that I don’t mind their company and just get into my tent, we’ve reached a mutual agreement of peaceful coexistence. Along with the growing mold that I’ve been living in as it’s rained non stop for too long and my clothes very quite dry.

I expand my knowledge of insects everyday as a new friend crawls into my tent and surprises me in the middle of the night. I’ve gotten immune to the fear factor of insects and frequently catch myself gentling grabbing daddy long legs with my hands and removing them from the tent. 

Life here is dirty, adventurous, and radical. I’m realizing that it’s a really sweet reflection of how Jesus started his journey too. 

I was reading the gospel of Luke, and the famous birth of Jesus in the manger, the basis of America’s favorite holiday; but this time it read differently to me. 

Luke 2:7 reads “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” 

How beautifully ironic is this, the king of all kings, the prophesied messiah, the savior of all mankind had no available rooms for him. Not a single vacancy in a room for the birth of our savior. 

I think this is a really interesting reflection into how we live our lives. We so often compartmentalize our lives into rooms. A room for our work, a room for school, a room for friends or maybe just separate rooms for the hard part of our lives that have a safe lock and key. 

Jesus, the king of the universe, actively purses us, the hotel, but the funny thing is that we convince ourselves that there are no guest rooms available for him. That we have filled up every room in our hearts with the abundance of the world that we neglect the presence of Jesus in our rooms. 

The beautiful truth is that Jesus never intended to come into our life and only occupy one room in the hotel, he is found out in the manger. Out in the cold, out in the unknown. 

Jesus meets us in the uncomfortable, reveals himself in hardship and calls us to so so much more than a temporary occupant in one of our rooms.

Eric Gilmour, in a novella of his stated, “Shift the paradigm from being whipped into obedience to falling in loveand giving ourselves to the desires of Him.” 

I am continuing to realize how to shift my mentality of following Jesus from following a stigma of obedience to falling in love. From creating vacancy in my heart to going out into the manger. 

Thanks Jesus for making life so incredibly full and fun in your presence (even when the tent life gets hard and a bit gross :).