The Lord needs it.
Drawing by Nancy Rodriguez
I read these words on Palm Sunday. Normally within this story, I would focus on the palms waving, the people fulfilling prophecy in their shouting to the “Blessed One who comes in the name of the Lord.” But during this particular reading, my attention shifted to these words, spoken in reference to the colt the disciples were on errand to find:
“The Lord needs it.” Luke 19:31
I was stuck. I guess it blessed me to know that even though the Lord owns everything, he needed something. I’ve heard many, many people say, “the Lord doesn’t need us to accomplish his will.” Yet, he needed that young donkey that day. He needed the upper room for his last supper, and he even needed someone to give him a drink.
Poignantly, he said, “I thirst.” John 19:28
The living water, who quenched my thirst forever, fulfilled the last bit of prophecy in uttering those piercing words. Several prophecies actually, and when his lips had touched the wet sponge of watered down wine, he knew he had perfectly completed his work on the earth. His next breath held and released a most powerful statement,
“It is finished.” John 19:30
Heaven and earth are so intertwined. It is extremely easy to see this in art. A human vessel pulls, as if from the air, inspiration and where once there was only a blank canvas, now exists a creation. The divine manifested in the natural but not without the necessary items.
The miracle of the fish and loaves so beautifully paints this picture of the normal, the natural, even the minimal betwixt with the heavenly, to produce a life giving source for those that were there that day. Heaven and earth intermingle to satisfy a human need. One and the other in “need” of each other, ascending, descending to see that the perfect will of God is expressed.
It breaks my heart each time I think of complete separation of heaven and earth, the moment Christ cried out (in a loud voice),
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mathew 27:46
The only time Jesus called him “God” and not “Father.”
That is incredible. Never had the Holy Trinity been severed. In this most desperate moment, Jesus became sin and the Father turned his face away.
Yet some of us cope this way daily. Without God, without our Father. The Son, for all time, had perfect union - until this very dark hour. No wonder the earth became dark. No wonder the ground trembled, the sky cried.
If you’ve ever felt as though your prayers hit the ceiling, remember that there is no ceiling that heaven can't penetrate. The Lord can meet your prayers there.
One of the teens we have built a relationship with, wrote to me during the Sunday service,
“I feel terrible and I think God hates me.”
As we normally do in the teen pew (as if I were a teen, even) we draw. So I drew on her note. And my drawing had a word bubble that said,
“It would be strange for God to hate you since he gave you his Son.”
And another bubble said,
“If he hates you then it would be weird for the Son to die just to be with you.”
Friends, let your simple and small be mixed with faith. God can use that. Whatever “that” is. It might be time spent listening to a friend at a cafe, a talent or dream that you are developing one day at a time, a small living room that you can host in, a text of encouragement to a person you normally don’t chat with, a car that you can use to bring a college student, or an elderly person to church. In fact, to accomplish some of his glory, he might “need” some of what you’ve got.
