Welcome to Imperfect Prose. Please feel free to link up your imperfect posts below. Today’s host is IP team member Shelly Miller of Redemption’s Beauty.
Awakened before my family, I lean on the kitchen counter, sip tea and wipe slumber on my pajama sleeves. Push the butcher knife through peeled potatoes, slice skinny carrots into barbarian wheels, and chop onions until fumes keep my eyes sealed shut. It’s after I pull the leg of lamb from the brown paper wrapper and lay it on the cutting board that tears begin to form. And I lay the knife down.
I cook every day, but today as I prepare Sabbath dinner in my crockpot, I see an innocent lamb raised somewhere by an unknown farmer, giving its life for my stew. I thank God for the sacrifice. And the dominoes of what I know about Jesus stacked neatly on the floor of my faith; they collide into a sighing heap.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. Isaiah 53:7 ESV
In a world of chatter and endless news updates I’m thinking about His silence. How Jesus didn’t defend himself, have a platform or place to lay His head at night. Leaning on the shoulder of the well-meaning should, I’m weary; enslaved by the ten points of other’s, simulating their success.
I want to hide in the corner, curl up in His lap. And learn from what He tells me not to say.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus says repeatedly. When he raises a little girl from the dead, heals a man of leprosy, restores sight to the blind.
He tells us to be secretly amazing. Wear remarkable when no one sees.
Because the One who needs to know about what you’re doing, already knows.
While the world elbows its way through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates, blogs and pontificates Jesus stands quietly on the corner handing out humble where there is no wait. And it seems that noble rides the bus wearing a miter with his mates, and this is what makes a man popular. He’s secretly amazing. He just does what he does without needing others to know about it.
And perhaps our silence speaks most of all.
It’s a fallacy that doing more means being more. According to God we are already enough. He can’t love us more than He already does. And this is where I find solace.
As I prepare for Sabbath, the deafening silence of the Lamb speaks, “Why do you assume success means being like everyone else.” He heals and restores and endures disgrace and He doesn’t need to publicize it. He’s secretly amazing.
Constrain me Lord when I need to listen.
Shelly Miller is smitten with the art of story to transform a life. She writes about her own struggles as a child of divorce and alcoholism, and the way God redeems it all as a clergy wife raising two teens. Connect with Shelly on her blog Redemptions Beauty, on Facebook and Twitter.
**Please note, we’re going to be taking a BREAK from Imperfect Prose NEXT WEEK; we’ll be returning the week after Easter**
every thursday, we gather together to celebrate redemption. here are the details:
1. link up a post (old or new) that relates to redemption.
2. put the ‘imperfect prose’ button at the bottom of your post, so others can find their way back here (see button code in right-hand column of my blog)
3. read other’s prose, and encourage them!
so won’t you join us, as we “walk each other home”? (ram dass)
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