The Weight of a Gift

Last evening, I saw a true show of extravagant, crazy love. It wasn't new and it wasn't earth-shattering. But it may have been the very first time I truly saw it.

I had been grumbling for a while now that there is not single thing in the house that is my own. Nothing that personally belongs to me and me alone. This desire strikes me as extremely selfish and yet extremely urgent at the same time. I rush to explain it. The thing I own wouldn't define me, I say. I make excuses, searching in the deepest recesses of my emotions for the reason for this unwelcome desire that seems to consume me.

Well, I cannot complain any more. My husband bought me a notebook computer - one bigger, faster, better than I wanted. One that slightly embarrasses me and slightly scares me because of the money we spent on it. One that, if I had been working, I would have struggled to pay him back for. Except, I don't work. And I have no way of paying for this laptop I didn't deserve but so graciously accepted. I didn't need it, per se. It was a gift, in the purest sense of the word.

I always thought people who said they didn't deserve things they received were lying, that their humility was false. Yesterday, I rethought that idea. Yesterday, as I went through the emotions of trying to reconcile receiving this gift - defined by dictionaries as something bestowed or acquired with no effort on the part of the recipient to earn it - with somehow paying for it or even deserving it, I realized: I don't think I had ever felt this way before. Ever. In my entire life.

The converse of this ugliness is that after receiving a gift such as this one, I still feel like I have to earn it, make up for it in some way, so that the scales are balanced on some cosmic level known only to me. I never thought I would be one who had a hard time accepting love, that I was one who feels she must earn it. But I am.

Psalm 103 comes to mind. It says God has crowned us with lovingkindness and tender mercies. I thought I understood it, but I guess I don't really. For all my entitlement, I suppose I am still lacking in understanding the true depth of God's love, a small measure of which I saw through my husband's lavish spending on me yesterday.

Perhaps that's why the world has trouble understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes the weight of a gift is just a little more than we can bear to understand.