Discovering glory in everyday life.....

I just had to bring you this on a cold November day:

GLORY = when your messiah drives a minivan by timothy paul jones

Heat shimmers upward from the pavement, birthing miniature mirages that dance madly between bumpers and fenders in an endless chain of automobiles. A revolving bank sign reveals that the time is 4:12pm,….Oklahoma on a late summer afternoon…
The conflicting messages on the bumper stickers and the varying rhythms of the heads bobbing above the drivers’ seats divulge the diversity of this area. Hummers and Harleys wait alongside mud spattered pickup trucks and compact cars past their prime.
Nothing here seems glorious. It is an ordinary afternoon filled with ordinary people trying to find their way home amid the hubbub and hullabaloo of their ordinary lives.
My seven-year-old sits beside me in the car, face upturned as she sings along with the latest single by U2. As our car curves to the right, something on the opposite side of the intersection seizes Hannah’s attention.
‘Look!’ she points towards a battered minivan, a fading remnant of that brief moment in the 1980s when Americans inexplicably used the words minivan and cool in the same sentence. ‘Look! There’s Jesus.’
I glimpse just enough of the vehicle’s lone occupant to grasp the reason for her momentary delusion. The driver is long-haired, bearded, and olive-skinned, white teeth glinting through a gentle smile.
The Jesus of a thousand Sunday School take home papers.
Without thinking I smile and reply; ‘No, Hannah. That wasn’t Jesus. It can’t be. Jesus lived on earth a long time ago….almost two thousand years ago. It was just someone who looks like the paintings of Jesus.’
‘But,’ Hannah is staring through the rear window, eyes still riveted to the minivan, ‘It was Jesus! I saw him.’
‘No, Hannah,’ my tone is harsher than I intend. ‘It wasn’t Jesus. It couldn’t have been.’
The minivan vanishes into the jumble of vehicles crisscrossing the intersection, and Hannah coils back into her seat with a whisper, ‘But Daddy, it was.’ As her moment of childlike wonder chokes in a sea of grownup logic, a gentle murmur wends its way past the dry bones of a soul that once found magic wands in the branches of ordinary trees and glorious wonders amid the stars of a common sky.
What if she’s right?
What if God’s presence is nearer than I ever imagined?
Years of rational thinking and theological training recoil at this thought, this alien intruder from a childhood long past. God in a minivan! That’s as absurd as…..as…. The other voice—the voice of childlike wonder----whispers again, As absurd as the glory of God erupting from a burning shrub on the far side of a Middle Eastern desert? As absurd as the Messiah, enfolded in the flesh of a peasant’s baby, tumbling into a feed trough in Bethlehem? As insane as the King of the Universe screaming from a wooden stake, stabbed like a dagger into the heart of the Hill of the Skull? As crazy as all the other wonders that you claim to believe, that you’ve embalmed in the pages of your theology but that you’re unwilling to look for here and now?
‘But then again, Hannah.’ I hear a voice speaking and realise that it must be my own, ‘who knows? Maybe it was.’ And suddenly an ordinary afternoon is filled with extraordinary possibilities. For I find myself realising anew---even, in some shadowed corner of my soul, believing---that God is always present, always available, even in the moments when I least expect it.
What I am experiencing is a reminder of glory.

From ‘Hullabaloo' by Timothy Paul Jones. Used by permission.
More information about Hullabaloo, as well as musical playlists:
http://www.timothypauljones.com
Order copies of Hullabaloo here.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0781444837?tag=timothypauljo-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0781444837&adid=0P2WGPJX8P2Y846AECCX&: