8 Milk Maids

"On the 8th day of Christmas, my true love sent to me 8 maids a-milking." Where are those maids?! I need them NOW! Forget the milking, girls! Just start cleaning up and throwing out the clutter. That would be my husband's dream Christmas--8 people indiscriminately throwing out our clutter--with me unable to say "No! Stop! I think we might need that! Don't throw that away!"

But I digress (again). When this song was originally written, a woman who milked cows was considered to have the poorest and worst job in all of merry old England. The Lord Jesus, however, came to save the lowest of the low (and the highest of the high). His gift of salvation is freely available to anyone and everyone who believes, and no one can be too lowly or insignificant or sinful to enjoy His gift of abundant eternal life. He came even for the milk-maids... and the prostitutes and the death row inmates and the insane and the elderly lost in a fog of dementia. He came as a baby to poor, common, uneducated, working class teenagers. Born in the midst of the dirt and excrement of animals. None is too humble or lowly or undesirable for His redemptive love.

The 8 maids a-milking represent those who are blessed according to Jesus: those who are poor in spirit, those who are mourning, those who are meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Those who are bent with care or worn out with sorrow or devoid of hope or frightened by the unknown future or lonely and bereaved. Those for whom life has brought them down low. They are the ones who can kneel humbly before the manger and find in it their Savior, their joyous Redeemer, their source of true blessedness.

I'm thinking right now of some friends who are being forced to wade through mighty deep waters. I cannot imagine their pain... O but my Savior can. He knows. He feels. He strengthens and blesses even in the darkest of days. In the words of Betsie ten Boom, while in a German concentration camp in World War II, "No pit is so deep that His love is not deeper still."

Deeper even than the pits of loneliness and betrayal and illness and death and despair. Deeper than the pits of our pride or selfishness or hatred. Deeper than the pit of a Roman cross on a windswept hill overlooking Jerusalem. His love is deeper still. Far far far deeper still.

So today, whatever your sorrows, your failures, your fears, your inadequacies, His grace and love and mercy are infinitely greater and better and more powerful. Might He who blesses the lowest and the weakest, put a song in your soul even if there is sorrow in your heart.

He is able. Boy, is He able! (Eph. 4:20-21) And His name is Jesus. To our Savior and Redeemer be all the glory.