What is your gift wrapped in?
As each of you has received a gift (a particular spiritual talent, a gracious divine endowment), employ it for one another as [befits] good trustees of God’s many-sided grace [faithful stewards of the [a]extremely diverse powers and gifts granted to Christians by unmerited favor]. 1 Peter 4:10 (AMP)
By Bobby R. Henry, Sr.
As I look under our Christmas tree and I see the gifts, I think to myself: how beautifully wrapped and how enticing they are.
The elaborate wrappings with the superb renditions of winter wonderlands to include happy humans and friendly animals entice me to pick it up and shake it to try and deduce what’s inside.
As I embark on this mental expedition of speculating to what is inside of these most intriguing and ornamented packages, the craziest thought whizzes across my mind; If my life were wrapped as a gift, would someone want to hurriedly open me up?
If we’re to be gifts to others, our wrappings i.e. decorum, should be as appealing.
Our good manners and respectability should not be confused with a physical appearance. That old cliché, ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’, has a much greater significance than its material implication.
Are our lives enticing enough that create such a positive center of attention, that anybody would want to take us home and without any hesitation rip open the packaging to discover the joys inside?
What would be found once unwrapped if we as gifts were presented to others? Are our joys replaced with discarded pieces of junk that nobody wants to look at or even consider to be a gift in its most simplest form?
Instead of having ourselves presented as gifts from the in-side out with a heart of faith, we have allowed life to structure and gift wrap us from the outside in with a sense of hopelessness.
From this perspective, our lives are no longer stories of glorious over comings but have become fleeting images of a silent movie of discontent.
Where is the Christmas cheer? Where is the celebration for the reason of the season? Where is the understanding of the Greatest Gift of all? Where is Love?
God is Love.
But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. Corinthians 13:13 (NAS)
If we profess to be made in the image of God or to be Christ like, then at least during this time of the year, let us consider being the most beautiful gift that we can ever offer anybody. When we have allowed God to come into our lives to redirect, mold and create us over, we can be that almost perfect gift.
Love is a gift that is so radiant it leaps outside of the box and consumes all in its presence. A gift that is so beautiful that everybody wants to take it home and open it up to find out what is truly inside.
Well, if you don’t know God, you may never know Love.
Why not give the Gift that no amount of money can buy and no human being can live a life worth anything without it?
Dear God, teach us how to give the gift of love as You instructed your Son and when we fall short, please love us more that we may know the unsearchable depths of what Your love is all about.
Love is the gift that keeps on giving!
