God with us - even in a plastics factory.... - 15 Feb 2006
Over the festive period and preceding months when I was temping in a factory I was struck by a new revelation of the incarnation.
When we tend to think of Jesus’ incarnation as Immanuel ‘God with us’ we think of the profound and wonderful truth of God sharing our happiness and joy, our pain and sorrow as one who went through it Himself.
However, a large part of our lives is not spent experiencing these highs and lows of emotion but instead experiencing the emotions in the middle.
These include boredom, frustration and the mundanity of our ordinary lives when things are not always exciting or unpredictable.
This was brought home to me when I was working in a plastics factory and repeated the same procedure every 20 seconds for 8 hours a day.
This revealed to me a truth of the incarnation – that God not only shares our highs and lows but the middle ground which is neither high nor low. As a carpenter I’m sure that Jesus did many things that were monotonous and repetitive but it is the fact that God has shared these things as "the Word made flesh" that informs our response to this experience.
God’s presence with us in times of boredom allows us to move beyond the mundanity of our situation and meet God and pray to Him because He understands our situation just as He understands our suffering and joy.
Also, God’s transcendence above earthly pain, joy and ordinariness means that communion with Him gives us a taste of heaven where those things will be forgotten as we worship Him forever.
This a personal meditation by Fred Cavill, who's involved in organising Prayer Rooms in Leicester, UK, and does not necessarily represent the views of 24-7prayer.