To Give Them Cookies

I was trying to explain the concept of passing along the grace and love that we have received from God to a little kid. And the easiest way I could explain it was to just say, let's pretend I gave you a box of cookies and told you to share it with people. The cookies aren't coming from you - I gave them to you, but the act of passing it on lies with you. 

For some reason, picturing this in my mind helped me too. It's so easy sometimes for the being-nice-to-people-who-are-being-less-than-lovable to become a hand-wavy, abstract concept that I struggle to convince myself is the right thing to do. Let's just say that there are certain people in everyone's lives that are, to borrow from my pastor's terminology, growth accelerators. And, sometimes when life comes crowding in, it's easy to forget that we are called to show grace and love even to those who are being just plain annoying or worse. So, I've started thinking of it as giving them a cookie. When someone is driving me insane, to stop and remind myself that maybe they don't deserve a cookie, but neither do I. And the cookies that I've been given, I've been commanded to pass along. So as I step out into the world with my little box of cookies, I remember that it is God who fills up that box with grace and love for me, and I remember that He loves each and every one of the people that I meet. He's called me to share His love and grace even if they don't want it. My job is to give the cookie. And so this Christmas season as we give gifts, remembering the gift that God gave us two millennia ago as He sent His Son to this earth to save us, will you join me in giving cookies to the people around us - sharing the overwhelming love and grace of God that we have so fully experienced ourselves?