Two and a Half Cent Incarnation

My two sons and I went to Swaziland in June which as expected was a leveling experience. We ended up far from the capital or any town for that matter, highly rural on the Mozambique border amongst the orphans, in a country of orphans. You can get the background data anywhere on the impact of HIV in Africa so I won't go into it here.

One of things we brought in our bags were beads and strings to make jewelry with the kids. Little did we suspect how such a simple thing would impact a bunch of kids (200+). Of course owning nothing provides a certain level of distinction.

There are various portions of the Gospels which as an American I have a hard time imagining. At least two of them I finally experienced in Swaziland in a way that no amount of reading or contemplation had elicited. In Luke Chapter 5 verse 1 "So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to heard the word of God..." one of the many "pressing" passages in the Gospel especially around healing. What did that mean or feel like? I don't know but I'm sure there was no desire to hurt Jesus.

In Swaziland surrounded by a 100 kids with my back to a wall sitting down on the ground with a bucket of beads which they did not even consider plunging their hands into (in fact when i dropped a bead they would put it back in) I got a taste of being "pressed". As the wife of head of the missions organizations prayed I began to speak about incarnation.

God comes as the string to bind with the beads, the beads are the flesh of man which becomes Christ the bracelet which we place ourselves into. Only the Holy Spirit can ultimately reveal the incarnation with two and half cents worth of beads and string, I pray that he does.