a most glorious emptying

Today, St Gregory the Great gets really DEEP when he talks about Jesus emptying Himself when He became man, in today's reading from A Year with the Church Fathers.

He tells us that Jesus emptied Himself completely, so that when He was united with the Father, it would be a complete union. Very profound. So profound, in fact, that I only understand it to a certain level.

But... it does give us some insights for living. Because we need to do the same, don't we? I mean, we don't want to empty ourselves so that we lose our personality and our sense of identity. We DO offer those things up to Him, but when He fills us with His spirit and His presence, we most fully learn who we truly are. We gain our sense of self and identity in a way that we never could have without offering them up to Him.

Because He knows not only who we are, but who He created us to be. He knows where we're starting, and He knows what we will look like at the end of our development. He sees us as the caterpillar now, and He knows exactly what we will look like as butterflies.

So we can in confidence say with John the Baptist, "He must increase, and I must decrease." Not so that we can be absorbed into the spirit of the Godness and lose our identity... but so that He can recreate us to be the people that He intended us to be from before the birth of the universe.

God, thank You for having the big picture in mind, so I can trust You with the little picture of my life.