Last week, our Lenten gospel reading was the Transfiguration. Jesus took his disciples up on a mountain and started shining like the sun. Peter was fascinated, and immediately began asking Jesus if he could pitch some tents up on top of the mountain and just stay there forever! I have this same feeling when our family has big, huge, memorable events: weddings, funerals, anniversaries. We can feel Christ present with us during those events. But during our everyday lives, it’s hard to feel Jesus with us. But He’s there just the same, in a hug from your spouse or a smile from your child. One thing I’m challenging myself to do during this Lent is to think about how Jesus is with us in our everyday, ordinary experiences. In our family, we’ve been lucky enough to have a bottle of wine to help remind us how special every ordinary day can be.
About 25 years ago, Tim and I were newly married and on a wine-tasting trip to the south of France. We were lucky enough to get a private tour of a high end wine cellar and at the end we decided to buy a bottle of expensive St. Emilion wine that promised to only get better with time. We bought the bottle, and immediately began thinking of when we might drink it. Should we have it on our ten year anniversary? Or perhaps save it for our 20th? At the birth of our first child? Or maybe at one of the weddings of our children? Or perhaps at a high school graduation celebration? The bottle of wine provided an opportunity for us to indulge ourselves in our wildest dreams about what our future would bring, we were young and in love and the future was full of hope and promise. We had no idea what was ahead: it was all possibility.
The bottle of wine journeyed with our family, through two countries, two states, and 4 houses. With each move, we’d reminisce about our trip to France and our hopes and dreams, and we’d wonder if the wine was going bad (you never know until you actually uncork it). Our family travelled along with the wine, through the birth of our three children and their failures and successes, the poignant losses of our parents to cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, a year-long job search after my Tim’s company relocated to South Carolina. After our 20 year anniversary, we began to ask ourselves in earnest: when do we drink the wine? What moment can possibly be special enough to drink the wine? What event will capture the fulfillment of all of our hopes and dreams that we shared on that afternoon in France 25 years ago?
This Christmas, we realized the moment had come. We deliberately decided that we wanted to drink the wine together with our children on a day that was not a special celebration, but instead at a quiet family dinner because we realized that our ordinary life was in fact quite miraculous and in a sense sacramental with a small “s”. I feel blessed that because we continued to consider when to drink the wine, we came to an awareness that Jesus has been our friend and companion throughout – in the intimate, quiet moments even more deeply than in the loud, celebratory events (and if you know our family, we’ve had a few of those). Just being together, with your loved ones and Jesus, is the greatest gift, if you only can see it.
Your family may not have a special bottle of wine to challenge you to reflect on our blessings, but I hope that during this Lent you come to recognize that the ground you are walking on is holy and the companion journeying with you is Jesus. Allow him to take the scales from your eyes so you can see how your everyday life is in fact infused with the sacred and be willing to drink deeply from the cup of life that he offers all of us, in times of both joy and sadness.
--Jeannie Steenberg
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