In our front garden stands a skinny Japanese maple tree, currently covered in bright white lights for the Christmas season.
Below it rests the image of the Baby Jesus in the manger, adored by Mary and Joseph.
More white lights line the small iron fence along the front walkway.
From the street, it looks like a little haven of lights for the Nativity scene — a cozy and fitting resting place for the image of Baby Jesus to lie.
Except it’s not perfect.
I’m not the one who painstakingly put up the lights, so truly I can’t say much, but I noticed — unfortunately afterward instead of beforehand — that the lights on the tree do not match the lights along the walkway. Both strands differ in size and hue.
They should match.
And it makes me crazy that they don’t.
“Yes,” I’m sure my husband would say sarcasically, “that’s the one thing that makes you crazy.”
A perfect haven
Now don’t be misled. My house is definitely neither ultra clean nor super orderly — it is realistically, as my mother would say, “clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”
But, in my little idiosyncratic mind, there are indeed certain things that need to be a certain way.
And providing a perfect resting place for Our Lord is one of them.
Mismatched lights do not a perfect haven make.
But they remind me of the countless imperfections marking my own heart, which should be a haven for Our Lord.
How can He possibly find a place to lay His head in such imperfection, distraction, and sinfulness?
And yet, surrounded by our humanness, He still reaches for each of us, gently nudging, and patiently waiting for us to welcome Him.
Resting in Our Lord
It is, in fact, when I come to rest with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, when I lay at His feet all of my imperfections alongside all of the love within my heart, that I am made keenly aware of His nearness and love for me despite my failings.
“Have we given our Lord our whole heart, or are we attached to ourselves and our interests and comfort and self-love?” said St. Josemaria Escriva (Christ is Passing By, p. 33).
“Is there anything in our lives out of keeping with our Christianity, something which makes us unwilling to mend our ways? Today we are given a chance to set things straight.”
Resting in Him sheds light on areas of my heart that must be rooted out in Confession so that He in turn can rest in me in the Eucharist.
An overwhelming love
What beautiful gifts He has given us so that we might know His overwhelming love!
And even though it makes me crazy that my heart can never be an absolutely perfect resting place for Our Lord, He still loves me just the same, in my imperfect human haven of mismatched lights and all.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a teacher’s aide at St. John the Baptist School in Waunakee.