Jew for a Day

I am trying to imagine myself a Jew today.
Or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, or a Muslim.
I know that God exists.  
He made me. His power drives the world.
Somewhere, from up high and far away, He influences my life.

I try to serve Him. I try to obey Him. I reach out to love Him, to draw near to Him, but He is too terrible, too far.
He speaks to men sometimes, but they don't benefit much from the conversation.  They are too flawed themselves.
Such men have stood so near God as to hear His voice in thunder and whisper, to feel the heat of His fire, to witness His blinding brightness, but even then, they fail.
They smash His personally engraved tablets in a fit of anger.
They fear their king so deeply that they tell him their wife is their sister.
They sleep with their captain's wife, then kill him to cover it up.
No, these men, though they have spoken with God, do not help much at all.

And, because I am a Jew, there is no Jesus.
God shows no gentleness, little mercy, no offered fellowship, no shared humanity.
I long for God, but know that He will not share His heaven with the likes of me.
I can never know my God.

Then I remember Simeon:
Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for the face of all people; a light to  lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of your people Israel.--Luke 2:29-32

He saw Jesus on the day of His presentation in the Temple.
One look.  That's all it took to change an impossible contradiction into hope and a future.
One look.
Not a God far away, but God in my own skin.
Simeon, a faithful Jew, but as sad and impatient as the rest, had waited for the promise.
And it came.
It came to him in the same way that it comes to everyone--in one moment.

I look up and He is there.
My Savior lives.