Choked

God's gifts - his Word, his sacraments, his Law & Gospel - are means to a beautiful end: His redeemed people, strengthened by his grace, showing his love to those who need it. When we worship, we get an opportunity to find refuge in these gifts, spiritually rejuvenated as we receive his promise to never fail us. 

It's amazing when this works. I hope you've had a chance to see it. When people of God, secure in his love for them, are confronted with unique or jarring or complicated opportunities to show the earnest, yearning love of Jesus to someone who is truly, fundamentally in need of it...few experiences are better. 

It honestly gets me choked up. When you hear that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, gave you his body and blood so that you could be strong for every situation - what can be better? When you see someone baptized and know that they are being made into a totally new creation that can now live love it could never live before - what is more special?

Maybe you think it's dumb to get emotional about things, but at the same time I wonder if we just get choked up about the wrong things. Or, at least, that we don't get choked up about the right things. 

When God reaches down to you - yes, even to you - through his gifts, if we can stop for a second and dwell on how far he is going to get to you and how willing he is to cross that chasm, we'll realize that no situation, no opportunity to love, in which we find ourselves is too much to ask. He's done the hard part. He just gives us a chance to share what he has brought us with others.

I hope you get to be in an uncomfortable opportunity, where sharing Jesus' love requires you to dig deep. 

I hope you take that opportunity. 

I hope when you do, you get overcome (or at least nearly overcome) with emotion - not because you're so good, but because God is.