The Gift Inside the Orange Nike Shoebox

When I was a young twenty-something, my Mom and my Dad handed me an orange Nike shoebox for my birthday. I was a broke college student, and a pair of totally cool new running shoes with the Nike “swoosh” on the side would be the most Awesome. Thing. Ever.  But alas, there were no running shoes inside the Nike box. Instead, I opened the box to find a huge, leather-bound study Bible with gold-leaf-edged pages and my name emblazoned in gold lettering on the front. Talk about disappointment. I thought I would cry right then and there.

But…

(Yes, but. Hallelujah, BUT!)

Something happened between the shoebox Bible and me. The thing was so hefty. I lugged it around with me wherever I went. It had all these footnotes and little mini-sermons in the middle of chapters. I remember learning that one of the roots of the word “baptism” is “to pickle.” God, I want to be “pickled” in You, I prayed. And God and I laughed together. He knew what I meant. He loved me sitting near to Him, reading His love letter to me.

How your relationship to God through Christ becomes the most real thing in your life ever is an invisible mystery. It’s like when the trees and flowers blossom all their fluffy, itchy pollens in the springtime, and release those teeny tiny flying seeds to the breeze, and somehow one of those seeds finds its way into the ground and is covered, and takes in the rain and the sun and breaks open after a time, and grows up and up into a mighty tree itself… from flying fluffy seed thing to rooted in the ground to growing to grown… all of it a mystery. Even though we know how it all works, we still marvel at the annual miracle.  

In the same way, how your faith is planted, takes root, and grows is a mystery. There is an invisible transaction that takes place between your soul and the Holy Spirit, both things we can’t see or touch. The faith part is knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that both your deepest eternal self and the Spirit of God are very real things, despite the non-existence of physical evidence proving it. Faith requires that we exercise our very, very weak  trust-muscle, trusting that that which can’t be seen or known like we see and know all the other things is, in fact, truer than all the other things.  Yes, this one thing in life—this issue of faith— is very different from all the rest of the things. Your Father designed it that way. He’s brilliant at designing things in the most best way possible.

The most satisfying mystery is when these two things—your deepest self, and God—are joined together.  Joined together, never to be put asunder. Yes, like in the declaration of a man and a woman married. It is a secret and mysterious bond, never to be broken. It is for forever. You are for forever. In a forever family.

So if you’re lucky like I was and someone hands you an orange Nike shoebox with a Bible inside, don’t be disappointed you didn’t get cool new running shoes. Take that Book and open it. Let God’s invisible hand carry the seed of faith from His words to your deepest invisible parts, and plant it there, in you. Someday, you will thank Him for this gift of faith. It will be your most treasured possession.