Jubilee!

A year of Jubilee. It hit me listening to the radio. A woman in deeper than she planned credit card debt was chatting about the new Credit Card Bill of Rights. I asked the Lord to grant her her own year of Jubilee.

What credit card company would forgive debt? Well, maybe if you're persuasive you could get your fees reduced or minimum payment amount altered. But completely forgiven? No way.

But the Lord had different plans. He had jubilee in mind, he had freedom in store. He said that every 7 years should be a year of jubilee--debt forgiven.

I was at the Farmer's Market today and when I came home and was washing the strawberries, I smiled to see the "ugly" berries. I try to check for them in all of the produce I buy. I know that if the fruit and veggies have imperfections that they are real. Only soil-grown, organic produce doesn't look perfectly pretty and shiny. You have to go the supermarkets for that stuff. At the Farmer's Market, it's just the real stuff--the dirty, varied stuff.

Is that how I can know I am real? My imperfections? My many debts? My dirt-rubbed skin? Do they prove that I am real, that I exist in this struggle to glorify Him in all I do? I think so.

Too often, we can sit down and even in an iron sharpening iron situation, point out the one who is always struggling. The one who just seems to always be in something or other. But the struggle is so worthy and the fighter so honorable! Not shiny and attractive like pesticide sprayed food, but they are the non-glamorous juicy and nutritious real thing. Fighting the struggle, being in the midst of laying things aside and picking up your cross doesn't look shiny. It looks ugly.

But it's the half-picked through, dirt-rubbed and sometimes even dented produce that is the real fruit. And God has already planned for us messy ones--He has promised Jubilee. It is here in Jesus! And the messier we are, the more we need Him!

Thank You, Jesus, for imperfect food, dirt and most of all, for You, our Jubilee!