The Humbling Middle {30 Days of Gratitude for Middling Things}...because you asked for it...

Much is being said about the "downward mobility of Christ", and it is all true.  Yet, I am being struck broadside these days with the  middling-mobility of Christ.

I am grateful for a God who split time down the middle by coming to middle earth as a human being.  I am encouraged by a God who waited to perform His first miracle until middle age.   I am saved by the God who died in the middle of two criminals, suspended on a cross mid-way between earth and a sky that He made. I am daily blessed by a God who appears to us as the "middle" of the Godhead - between the Father and the Spirit. I am humbled by a God who, though highly exalted, is even as we speak, making intercession for us who are in the middle.

Christ Jesus embraced the humility of the middle.  Because of this, He is given a name which is above every name.

In this grasping, struggling-to-move-up Western world I live in, no one really wants anything mid-size.  I believe part of the feeling of our infirmity is the painful fact that we are all in the middle of something...we are in that place where the freshness of the small beginning is long gone, and the dream of a grand finale is not yet in sight.  We are in the plodding-place.

We feel vulnerable, and sometimes even naked and ashamed.

Friend, God...very God...is in the middle with you and I.  He created the middle of your story and sustains it to the point that you will discover the middle to be the best part of your story - because the tension of the plot only seems unresolved. You can be fully present to the story line, with all its loose ends, knowing that in the final chapter - it is all made beautiful.

We may live in a fallen world, a middling-place where regret is part of being alive - but we, of all people, are confident of an eternity that will carry no regrets whatsoever. All of them, gone. This is forever both the end of your story, and the beginning of "You: The Sequel".

Please take 30 days with me to feel around inside your heart for the gratitude that can sweeten this middle-time of life.

There is so much to be thankful for!