Since I won’t be back for Christmas, I brought a collection of Christmas dipped marshmallow pops for my nieces and nephews at out Thanksgiving gathering. We met at the manor my sister and her husband are house-sitting, and I put the jar of marshmallow pops up on the children’s table.
I have this little niece who is adorable but completely uninterested in having a relationship with me unless she is bribed.
At our family Thanksgiving, this niece finished her main course and left the table. Then she saw her oldest cousin with a marshmallow pop. She looked longingly at the marshmallow.
“Would you like to sit with Aunt Katrina and have one?” I wheedled.
So this…
was followed by this….
As soon as she got the marshmallow pop in hand, she wanted to jump down and run, but her mother made her stay at the table. So she stayed with me, because she couldn’t have the marshmallow pop without staying.
Have you ever been like the child looking at the marshmallow? We would like to run off and do our own individual lives sometimes. But perhaps if we don’t stay with God, we won’t get a blessing, so we begrudgingly hold on. We want to be on good terms with Him, as long as it does good things for us.
What a better plan He has for us! …and how Jesus did his best to get across to us the paradox that true life is about dying…and how hard it is for us to embrace that difficult thing that involves loving God so much that we don’t care if he takes away the marshmallow treat….we just want to stay in His arms anyway!
It takes me back to the Middle East, to the tiled office of someone who served us coffee and talked to us about his ministry among the refugees. He picked a mosaic tile off his desk and showed it to us. It was about the size of a coaster. He asked if I had ever seen the symbol before. I hadn’t.
“So, it’s an N, you say,” I said, confused.
“It’s an Arabic nun (pronounced noon), which is the symbol for our n.”
“For Nazareth,” I said.
“Yes. In this area they call Christians by the name Nazareth. It holds a negative feeling in this culture. They use this term to label Christians in a negative sense. So that’s why they use this letter to mark their houses before they…kill them or steal things from them. They mark it just to tell other people, ‘You are able to take anything here. Woman, money, anything you want.'”
“Oh! So this sign is used by ISIS!”
“Yes.”
“Oh!”
“…To tell them that everything over here is available, you can do whatever you want. So it’s a sign of shame but we are trying to say we are proud of being called Christians regardless of how they use it we are proud of that and getting it to show it to the world instead of hiding it or being afraid of it.”
“That’s really cool,” my co-worker Kevin said.
“Well, I would be happy to buy one,” I said.
“I think it resembles the cross in a way,” the other man said. “The cross was supposed to be a sign of shame but it reminds us of what happened and we’re proud of it. It’s the same thing.”
…And then she returned and sat with her mother for awhile.
And who can blame a 1-year-old? Mom is the relationship of choice! See her cousin below.
(Even though Aunt Katrina’s marshmallow pops may not be the parents’ treat of choice!)
Merry Christmas!
And may we never be ashamed to walk with God through thick or thin. If you come to my house you will see the Arabic letter tile in my living room. If you are my niece, I will let you play with it.