M&M (1)

Magnificent. Not a word most of us would identify with but I’ve heard it twice over the Christmas season in different contexts. Firstly a Church of England bishop thanked his diocesan staff for their work throughout the year in a Christmas video message with the words ‘You are magnificent!’ He leant forward in his seat, his body language emphasising the genuineness of his statement. As I heard the words (and they weren’t even aimed at me, I was eavesdropping on the video) I felt my heart respond in a strange way: it reached out like someone who’s just been handed a piece of valuable lost property they imagined they’d never see again. Recognition, relief, joy, gratitude. Rightness. How beautiful to be described in that way when you have simply faithfully done what you were expected and indeed paid to do. I found myself imagining the staff team this bishop works with (whom I don’t know), none of them thinking of themselves as anything but ordinary, delighting in this Christmas revelation that they are magnificent.

I was equally astonished to hear the word describing me. A friend was reading my Singleness Advent Diary (SAD, Facebook Dec 1st – 25th 2023). I was just starting out with a daily post and wondering what I was doing making myself so vulnerable in a public forum, a little fearful of where it might lead. ‘From where I’m standing right now,’ she wrote, ‘you look magnificent!’ What I was actually doing was sharing my loneliness, sadness, sense of exclusion and loss with what felt like the whole world. She told me she saw raw power and honesty, and in declaring what she saw, gave me courage to keep going.

These two incidents have re-calibrated my sense of how God sees us, all of us. God in Jesus knows how hard it is to be human. Is it possible our expectations of ourselves are sometimes higher than those of God? These are challenging times for humanity, for people who work in and for the Church, for followers of Jesus whoever they are. Keeping going in the face of all our many difficulties, being faithful, doing our best, showing up, risking ourselves without knowing the outcome, holding the tiller fast against a strong current that tries endlessly to nudge us off course: God sees us in these everyday spaces as magnificent.

Write it in lipstick on your mirror: ‘God sees my simple efforts as magnificent’.