stories, names, and a baby

A new year has come and with it the gentle reminder to pick up things once desired to do but simply overpowered and forgotten in the midst of everyday life. 

One such “desire” of mine is to blog.  I’ve been blogging off and on for a couple of years now, slowly baring my soul to an unknown audience of internet passer by-ers (nice grammar Matt). And so today I pick back up my “pen” and try and express some of my inner thoughts.  In a sense this is cheap therapy for me since I am forming and expressing my inner rumblings. 

Like many I know from my Church I am starting off the New year with a desire to read through the New Testament in 2009. I’m a couple of days late getting started but late is better then never.

Today I read the first chapter of Matthew, I said I was just getting started.  As I rolled through the genealogy of Christ, and the retelling of his birth I could not help but picture myself sitting next to a fire in the middle of a town square with a small crowd of people listening to a town elder retelling one of our greatest stories.  I image myself hanging on each of his words, and with anticipation longing to hear the unfolding of the story yet again.

I imaged myself making little mental checkboxes as the names where rattled off, like mini “ah ha” moments, as I recognized the names of the main characters of so many of my beloved stories.  The who’s-who’s list of my tradition being read, as mini dramas of their life flashed before my mind. 

The building of my faith, the reminding of my past, the culmination of all that we believe, serving not as the main story but as the opening lines of dialog.  I image the storyteller bouncing through the names with energy, speed, excitement, and then with a great exhale, pausing to let us hang in the tension of what would be next. 

Mary, a Baby, God with us, Immanuel.

Thousand of years of faith, tradition and stories all coming to one place, one moment, one manger, one teenage girl, one scared father, one little baby.

I once skimmed by the genealogies in scripture, mostly because the difficultly of the names frustrated me.  But today I read the names not as a nuisance but as a building crescendo of our faith, building through the fabric of all we hold true to lay open to the next great story, the story of Jesus.