Cut Down

Monday Devotional

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

but made himself nothing,

taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to death—

even death on a cross!”

Philippians 2:5–8

Christ’s humbling condescension to leave the glory of heaven; set aside his majestic, unveiled deity; and become a breathing, bleeding, “bodyfied” man—a process known to theologians as the kenosis—provides a model for our own call to practice humility. By God’s marvelous design, few life experiences humble us quite as effectively as parenting. As parents, we exchange our formerly spotless houses, ironed clothes, and ordered lives for the chaos of an incontinent, noisy, spit-producing being with a temper that needs to be tamed and with a piercing cry that rivals the sharpest fingernails ever scraped across a chalkboard.

This tiny tyrant is providentially placed into our house as part of a grand program: to mold his or her parents into the image of our Lord.

Writer Rachel Cusk recounts one of the most embarrassing moments of her life. She had met a friend for lunch at an outside table when the weather changed, and social disaster struck along with it:

It starts to rain, hard. I try to pack the baby back into her pouch, and I do it clumsily and unconfidently, and suddenly she starts to cry, to scream with an extraordinary, primitive anguish; and I am in disarray, knocking over coffee cups, fumbling with change, trying to speak, to pacify, to explain, holding the baby this way and that in the drenching rain and finally running through the park, the empty pouch flapping at my front, the roaring baby held out before me like something on fire, my friend trotting embarrassed behind, until we reach the road and madly, desperately, I flag down a taxi and somehow force the chaos of us into it. “I’ll call you soon,” says my friend strangely. I glimpse her through the window, slim and well dressed, compact, somehow extraordinarily demanding and utterly implacable, politely waving from the pavement.