In Eugene Peterson's book, Take and Read, he writes, "All of us have impulses from time to time to live a holy life--life lived as it should be, life true and good and beautiful, life lived for and in and by means of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. And then someone telephones with an invitation to the hockey game, or we notice that the salad needs oregano, or the crabgrass in the lawn suddenly becomes a pressing priority. We are distracted by the mundane and forfeit, for yet another time, the holy. Or so we assume.
"And then we find ourselves in the company of a writer or writers who penetrate the surface pieties and show us what the holy life is really like, that it is the hockey game and the oregano and the crabgrass that provide the raw material for holiness. Holiness is not being nice. A holy life isn't a matter of men and women being polite with God, but of humans who accept and enter into God's work of shaping salvation out of the unlikely materials of sin and ignorance, our ambition and waywardness--also our loves and aspirations and nobilities, but never by smoothing over the rough edges. Holiness is not polish."
As we read through the gospel accounts of the Christmas story this season, it is once again clear that God was willing to get his hands dirty in order for us to be clean. And then he works with us to make us more like Jesus, with our messy-ness and all. What amazing grace.
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