Read The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas Online
Authors: Ann Voskamp
Tags: #RELIGION / Christian Life / Devotional
The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas
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The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas
Copyright © 2013 by Ann Voskamp. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph taken by Stephen Vosloo. Copyright © by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Cut paper illustrations copyright © 2013 by Paula Doherty. All rights reserved. Author photograph taken by Molly Morton-Sydorak, copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Voskamp, Ann, date.
The greatest gift : unwrapping the full love story of Christmas / Ann Voskamp.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4143-8708-6 (hc)
1. Advent--Prayers and devotions. I. Title.
BV40.V67 2014
242'.33--dc23 2013017996
ISBN 978-1-4143-8851-9 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-8719-2 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4143-8852-6 (Apple)
Build: 2013-08-08 15:22:10
Contents
Your Invitation to Unwrap the Gift
Jesse Tree Invitation and Instructions
December 1: It Is Advent: Come
December 2: Life Begins as a Love Story
December 8: The Stairway of God
December 11: A Scarlet Lifeline of Hope
December 12: Every Little Thing Is Going to Be Okay
December 13: Looking on Hearts
December 16: The Gift of the Storm
December 17: Lifting Up the Little and Small
December 19: Watching for Him Who Is Enough
December 20: When All the Miracles Begin
December 21: The Preparations Are Already Done
December 22: Be a Dwelling Space for God
December 24: God in the Manger
Your Invitation to Unwrap the Gift
Big and glossy and loud and fast —that’s how this bent-up world turns.
But God, when He comes —He shows up in this fetal ball.
He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white.
He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand.
The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant.
The Giver becomes the Gift, this quiet offering.
This heart beating in the chest cavity of a held child,
a thrumming heart beating hope, beating change, beating love, beating the singular song you’ve been waiting for —that the whole dizzy planet’s been spinning round waiting for.
Waiting.
Advent
.
It comes from the Latin.
It means “coming.”
When you open the pages of Scripture to read of His coming, of this first Advent, before you ever read of the birth of Jesus, you always have the genealogy of Jesus.
It’s the way the Gift unwraps: you have Christ’s family tree . . . before you have a Christmas tree. If you don’t come to Christmas through Christ’s family tree and you come into the Christmas story just at the Christmas tree —this is hard, to understand the meaning of His coming.
Because without the genealogy of Christ, the limbs of His past, the branches of His family, the love story of His heart that has been coming for you since before the beginning —how does Christmas and its tree stand? Its roots would be sheared. Its meaning would be stunted. The arresting pause of the miracle would be lost.
Because in the time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, it wasn’t your line of credit, line of work, or line of accomplishments that explained who you were.
It was your family line. It was family that mattered. Family gives you context, and origin gives you understanding, and the family tree of Christ always gives you hope.
The coming of Christ was right through families of messed-up monarchs and battling brothers, through affairs and adultery and more than a feud or two, through skeletons in closets and cheaters at tables. It was in that time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, that men were in genealogies and women were invisible. But for Jesus, women had names and stories and lives that mattered.
The family tree of Christ startlingly notes not one woman but four. Four broken women —women who felt like outsiders, like has-beens, like never-beens. Women who were weary of being taken advantage of, of being unnoticed and uncherished and unappreciated; women who didn’t fit in, who didn’t know how to keep going, what to believe, where to go —women who had thought about giving up. And Jesus claims exactly these who are wandering and wondering and wounded and worn out as
His
. He grafts you into His line and His story and His heart, and He gives you His name, His lineage, His righteousness. He graces you with plain grace.
Is there a greater Gift you could want or need or have?
Christ comes right to your Christmas tree and looks at
your family tree and says, “I am your God, and I am one of you, and I’ll be the Gift, and I’ll take you.
Take Me?
”
This,
this
, is the love story that’s been coming for you since the beginning.
It is possible for you to miss it.
To brush past it, to rush through it, to not see how it comes for you up over the edges of everything, quiet and unassuming and miraculous —how every page of the Word has been writing it, reaching for you, coming for you. And you could wake on Christmas only to grasp that you never took the whole of the Gift, the wide expanse of grace. So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait.
Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved.
For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out.
For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas.
Sometimes the heart waiting for the Gift . . . is the art of the Gift.
This waiting, your art —mark it.
Mark Advent with a counting, a way of staying awake and not missing.
It could happen like the numbering of time, like the rings on a tree.
Like a leaning over that Jesse Tree of the Old Testament, that Jesse Tree axed down, and counting rings down to the greatest Gift, to life out of the dream cut off.
That Jesse Tree, named after Jesse, who was the father of David —David to whom God promised that his line and his sons and his family would reign forever without end.
And when David’s sons and grandsons and great-grandsons turned from God and loved the gifts and the flesh more than the Giver and the Father —their kingdoms fell. Their homes fell apart.
It looked as if the whole family tree of Jesse had been chopped right off at the roots. But God . . .
But our covenant-keeping, promise-keeping God vowed, “Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot —yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. . . . In that day the heir to David’s throne will be a banner of salvation to all the world. The nations will rally to him, and the land where he lives will be a glorious place” (Isaiah 11:1, 10).
Out of the stump of our hearts . . .
In this day, this season, miracles will grow within, unfurl, bear fruit.
And the heart that makes time and space for Him to come will be a glorious place.
A place of sheer, radiant defiance in the face of a world careening mad and stressed.
Because each day of Advent, we will actively wait.
We will wait knowing that the remaking of everything has already begun.
We will linger over the lines of the Old Testament stories, tracing the branches of the family tree of Christ, the spreading pageantry of humankind, from Adam to the Messiah —each historical truth pointing to the coming, the already relief, the incarnation of God.
We’ll still and slow and trace each exquisite ornament pictured with these twenty-five Advent narratives, each ornament cut slow out of paper.
And there He is —the exquisite Gift cut and given for us, broken.
The Gift who hung on a Tree for us, cut off.
The Gift who was pierced for you, wounded —your wounded, willing God, who unfolds Himself on the Tree as your endless, greatest Gift.
Ann Voskamp
Jesse Tree Invitation and Instructions
So. It’s late November, and you’ll need your Jesse Tree to wait for Jesus’ coming. To come to the Christmas tree through the family tree of Christ.
Your Jesse Tree may take on a number of wondrous forms. A silhouette of a tree may be sewn or painted, cut out of felt, or quilted. It may be hung from the fridge, a wall, a door, a window.