about ridiculous and gorgeous gifts

I have a really precious, valuable pair of earrings. 

They are red and plastic and were probably purchased for less than $2. 

A few years ago I was in an orphanage in rural Nicaragua painting an interior room. I started chatting in broken Spanish to a girl who lived there – preteen, bubbly, likely there because her parents couldn’t afford to raise her, or because they hadn’t even wanted to – and I noticed the round earrings she was wearing. 

Que bonita! I said, pointing to them.  She smiled, proud, said “gracias” in a small voice, and then she walked away from me. 

A few minutes later, as our team was rinsing paint brushes and preparing to load our bus to leave, she came up and tapped me on the shoulder.  Her right hand was folded in a fist, which she unclenched to reveal the round, red earrings that she’d been wearing.  She extended her palm toward me – para ti. 

For me. 

I stood there speechless.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure what was appropriate to do.  This sweet orphan girl was standing in front of me, gifting me with what was likely the most beautiful thing she owned.  When you’re an orphan, owning anything is a big deal.  I couldn’t possibly accept it.

A translator was standing near me and I was so flabbergasted by the offer that instead of responding to the girl, I grabbed the translator’s arm and said “What do I say here??” She told me that I should take the gift.  Culturally, it would be rude of me to deny her offer.  “Plus,” the translator said, “You will bring her joy if you take them.” 

Sometimes you receive a gift and it changes everything.  This strikes me as new today. 

It is easy for me to love the Resurrection.  I love it because I love a good story that fills itself with magic, and the Resurrection is the best story and the most magical.  It is the story that all good films or songs or novels try to tell – it is the story where things have reached their most dire state, and suddenly something changes everything.  The Resurrection took the concrete borders of death and crumpled it like paper to be tossed out in the garbage.  The Resurrection makes everything new. 

It is easy for me to love the Resurrection as a story, but hard for me to love it as a gift. 

When Jesus rises from the tomb and appears to his disciples, he tells them to “receive the Holy Spirit”.  He has come so that we might do exactly that – receive: take this event in as something done for us, something that we should now call our own. 

And gosh, sometimes I can hardly wrap my mind around how to accept that. How is it that Jesus would give up his life for ME? How is it that I, someone selfish and sinful and unworthy, should reach my hand out and claim that gift from his palm?

And yet, I must.  Because a gift is made beautiful only when it is received.  And the Resurrection is the type of gift that makes US more beautiful only when we claim it. 

I want to be a person who is uncommonly humbled by the event of the Resurrection, but not so humbled that I deny that it was done for me.  Because it was.  I know that Jesus would have died and risen again even if I had been the only human living.  And that fact stuns me and alters everything about my life.  But I believe it, and as difficult as it is, I am trying to stand in front of Christ’s open palms, and reach toward them, hungry for the gift of life he offers me, a gift that is ridiculous and gorgeous and for the taking.