The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas by Ann Voskamp Read Free Book Online Page B

not chosen any of these.” Then Samuel asked, “Are these all the sons you have?”
    “There is still the youngest,” Jesse replied. “But he’s out in the fields watching the sheep and goats.”
    “Send for him at once,” Samuel said. “We will not sit down to eat until he arrives.”
    So Jesse sent for him. He was dark and handsome, with beautiful eyes.
    And the LORD said, “This is the one; anoint him.”
    1 SAMUEL 16:1-12
    Advent reflects.
    Candles flicker in windows, and you can see flamed light multiplied across dark. You can see your own face reflected in windowpanes, in a world of pain.
    You can see it, too, how the world keeps looking for beauty in appearances rather than in His appearing.
    Advent is this baptism of eyes.
    Like a clear washing of eyes.
    God tells Samuel that He has looked and He has found, provided for Himself a king. In Hebrew, God’s literal words are “I’ve seen me a King.”
    “Looking comes first,” is what C. S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce . [17] Looking comes first if you’re ever to find the life you want, if you are ever to “see you a king.” Always, always —first the eyes. Joy is a function of gratitude, and gratitude is a function of perspective. You only begin to change your life when you begin to change the way you see.
    Samuel —he sees the stature of Eliab and mutters, “Surely!” Surely this is the man in whom God’s seen Him a king.
    But the Lord draws near to Samuel: “The LORD doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”
    It’s not just Samuel. It’s us. It’s the whole of humanitywho live fixated on facades, blinded to the realest real. The shiny shell of things can bind you and blind you. It’s a veiled God who elevates the veiled things: the heart, the interior, the soul. And it’s a temporal world that elevates the foil and the plastic, the status and the skills, the physical and the tangible —all this concrete mirage. Humanity obsesses with vapors, not eternity.
    The reality is, you can lose your life, your joy if you are beguiled by the world’s rind and blind to its inner reality. The endless bombardment of ads, gloss, Photoshop —it’s like full-immersion sight lessons, schooling us to have eyes for everything unimportant and unreal. From Hollywood to Pinterest, the media of this world aggressively schools your soul to see the exact opposite of the way God sees.
    People aren’t bodies; they are hearts. We could train our eyes to turn everything inside out.
    “Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see,” writes G. K. Chesterton. [18] Let us exercise the eye until it sees through the fat of things, down to the eternal of things. Let us exercise the eye by walking with Christ.
    There is this call for every Christian to answer His calling to be an ocular surgeon. Our seeing must cut through surfaces and down to souls.
    You could close your eyes and ask it, see it. . . .
    Is my life about the heart of things? Is my Christmas?
    Am I deeply absorbed in Him and the heart of things? Or is my life a shallow absorption with surfaces?
    It’s strange how it affects us —from housekeeping to soul-keeping: if it’s mostly the surfaces that absorb us, then we’re mostly superficial. When my priorities aren’t the things seen —when my priorities are rather all things unseen —it’s only then that my life begins to have substance and weight.
    Your God never stops turning things inside out, seeking all things unseen, reversing the ways of the world. God never stops looking on the heart. God never stops looking for the world’s seconds, the unseen unimportant, and calls them the important firsts. Which means He raises Abel instead of Cain, Jacob instead of Esau, Isaac instead of Ishmael, Moses instead of Aaron, David instead of Eliab.
    Which means He raises the unseen and forgotten: Sarah instead of Hagar, Leah instead of