The Power and The Beauty of One

It runs through me like a current of the electric. Strong with awakening.

Powerful in its thrust and pulse.

And haunting like a metronome in its consistent cutting moves.

We can hear a message and it sounds like its cutting through clutter, the thick fog of a world’s static noise with its clarity.

In a season of waiting and working and wading toward Christmas how singular and powerful One is.

I see it repeated in my life like the multiplication tables of my childhood, again and again repetition brings understanding and memory and a lodging in the deep places. Where facts or is it truth should make its home and remain.

The power in One’s.

So my heart and my head just hear a singular message and it could be tucked away as many lessons are. Or it could be shared, as this one is.  But you always seem to be so generous with your one life in how you listen in love here.

I hear and feel the gentle whisper to give it wings. This picture of the power so often held by one.

There is strength and power in one. And it is made clearer in our Advent waiting for the celebration of the holy night into which Our Savior was born.

And God being God could have sent an Army, a battalion of Saviors. He could have sent triplets or twins or multiples to accomplish that which he so lovingly planned for our reconciliation to Him. We sinful, He holy.

But He sent His only Son. He sent One.

And so I look at His world and my world and this world through the lense of just how powerful one can be.

We have one heart, but two ears and two eyes. One heart keeps us beating breathing from birth to death. One.

And I look in the sky at a moon  by night and a sun by day. Day in and day out we are sustained by both. Singularly life giving, the sun its light. The moon and the tides and all that I don’t understand about the holy mystery of that.

The power in the heavens. By ones.

We women who are married live with the gift of one husband. And I think mine does the work of three or four men daily. And every day the beauty revealed,  the mystery grows  more holy and unfathomable.

The things accomplished through love in a family utterly amaze this wife of almost 25 years. And we have only just begun. Those things learned within a family are holy mysteries.

One family can teach us much about living.

The bride of Christ. One bride, one bridgegroom. The work to do on earth is large and ever looming. One and one. Just Amazing Grace.

After pouring out on the pages here words of offering as encouragement or hope or just art, the art found in weaving of words, I have often had one single comment speak into my heart…if only for that and for her it was all made worthy. It became something of value if it reached one heart of one woman or one man. One soul. A single solitary soul.

I write for One but often I am touched and blessed by one reader. And it is tender and merciful. I shake and shutter at the interaction between reader and writer.

And in this season of preparing for Christmas I am frozen in my ability to design and construct the proper expression of my love for family and friends. Numbed and deemed unable to decide how to move with a release of gifts and talents and money into the land of Christmas giving.

For my giving is an excercise in the imperfect  mirroring of love, as He gave everything, His one child. So we give.

And I know if I am wise I can impact the life of one with my giving. One child entangled in a cycle of poverty. One family, maybe with my giving.

It is inconceivable that I could really touch one, another with a gift. The unfurling of my meager offering. To love as Christ loved me.

That we all can, each one of us can.

And that one is enough, though it seems small. One is a good start. And one is important. And he can increase and multiply the power of Ones.

If God saw power,  life changing power at that ,in one, who am I to minimize the power in one gift, to one child, or one family. To another one in this world.

When I feel small and insignificant and frozen into inaction by the meagerness of my giving, I think on God’s ability to multiply my starting point.

The power of God to do big things with my small offering.

To inspire me to increase or expand. To take a gift and magnify its effectiveness.

If I let loose of my gifts, give them to Him, release and trust them to Him,  to use and heal and give hope, then I  give Him his rightful authority and power. To do with my oneness bigger things than I could do with any single offering.

To Him be the power and glory that are His, and may we release our singular offerings to His service, His glory and to  be used for His Divine choosing. For His purposes.

I am going over to the Compassion Christmas GIft Catalog. To ask Him how what I have may be used over there.

I need nothing. I want for nothing. My family and friends need and want for nothing, truly.

But maybe, just maybe, God can take my small offering and turn it into something much  bigger than I ever could.

On my own.

Alone. I haven’t  been the best steward of all He has given me. It would be wise to release more back to His hands for His use.

There I know they are in good hands.

There I know they will be used for His glory and His purposes.

He is the One who knows the need and has the power to redeem my ineffectual and just plain wrong choices on spending that which  He has lavished on me.

And by His grace, mercifully, He gives me another chance to give away.

One that I want to be used in love for good.

Like the one moon that shines bright, the one sun that sends rays of life giving light, the one husband who loves me and blesses me with his life, and the One Savior who was  born in a feed trough for me.

May God take my offering and make it holy and beautiful.

This one Christmas 2012.

Here is one place you can look when considering  your gift giving this year. I may see you over there looking around the pages of Compassion Christmas Gift Catalog.

Wherever you choose to give this year, may someone who is hurting and lonely and in need to blessed.

Merry Days of Christmastime to  each one of you, sweet readers.

click the link below to visit Compassion International’s Christmas Gift Catalog:

http://www.compassion.com/catalog.htm?referer=128060

Linking with Laura and Ann today.