When did we see you hungry and gave you something to eat?

In the end, it’s not about you.  It is about who loved you and where that love went.

Christ’s love for you flows over you every day, covering your naked places, quenching your thirst, filling your belly, binding your wounds, remembering your name when you are imprisoned.  Christ’s love pours out on you, naked, thirsty, hungry, lost, forgotten person that you are.  The God who gave you life in the beginning comes to you in the love of Jesus and gives you life again and again and again.

You know this because one day someone handed you a cup of water, that small gesture that claimed a shared humanity.  One day someone offered you steak when only oatmeal was on the table and you saw God’s abundance and mercy with new eyes and a satisfied stomach.  One day someone picked you up when this world, which is so far from the Garden of Eden we can’t imagine paradise ever existed, crushed you.

Until a day came when you saw another who was alone and forgotten and the love that claimed you poured out and claimed them as well.  One day the love that kept you upright found one who was laid low and it lifted them up.  One day the love that called you by name, the love that called you beloved, cried out in your voice and called the stranger beloved as well.

Paul called us clay vessels.  I think we are more like cracked pots who leak the enormous love of God that has been poured into us wherever we go.  We can’t help ourselves.  It’s what we are, what we do.  But we never do it ourselves, we just allow the water to flow through so God can bless others.