What does baby Jesus, your home and a strip club all have in common?

Let me explain.

This is more like a metaphor. Lost? Let me continue...

I am currently involved in a ministry called, Cherished.

Every second Friday-night of the month you will find the Cherished team at your local Hampton Roads strip club.  Yes, I said that.  A strip club! We give out 80-100 gifts bags at each outreach, and since we began this outreach a little over a year ago, we have given over 1,000 gift bags.  Inside the bag are two little gifts - earrings, lip gloss, eye liner, nail polish are a few possibilities.  But most important a dancer will also find in each bag a business-card with a website for more information about our group.  Our purpose is to befriend these women.  Seriously, just friendship.  

This team of ours, approximately 8 women on outreach and 4 that stay back to pray, are the closest thing to church I have ever experienced.  I'd like to believe it is because we come together share, worship, study the Word, pray, and then most importantly WE SERVE!  Not in the easiest of places, but where many believers are afraid to go: Satan's playground.  We have been kicked out aggressively, eyes rolled while saying no thank-you to our gifts, and asked to never come back.  But  many outreaches we overwhelmingly get hugs, thank-yous, many that say, "you have no idea how hard this business is," and many other warm welcomes.  

Many times during these outreaches I feel Jesus so strongly.  I realize this is where He would be.  Perhaps not inside this type of business, but definitely ministering to those who dance, those who participate, and those in the thick of it.  "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Mark 2:17

It was outside one of the clubs I realized my metaphor.

So if we were to compare our homes to a strip club it would most likely be a STARK contrast, right?  You may have never been in this type of club (I pray at least this is so), but you can draw on your stereotypes here: its dirty, its dark, lots of lust and game-playing.  Our home (prayerfully) is warm, inviting, where we like to spend our time.  At least I am speaking for myself - my home is my favorite place on earth.  When I am home, surrounded by my little family, there is NO other places I'd rather be!

This was where Jesus was before He came down as a baby: He was home, in heaven.  But He choose to come to this dirty, dark, lustful, and game-playing EARTH as a baby.  He didn't come as a big warrior on a cloud (that was waiting for His second coming) but he came as the least-of-these, a baby, at a questionable birth, He came from a questionable home-town, to a big ol' strip club we call EARTH! 

And why did He come? To serve us, to be our example and to Save us!

I know Christmas has passed, but let us reflect on the significance of God, in all His majesty in the comfort of His Glorious Home, would come down to us, to die on a cross -a death for a criminal - just so we (everyone!) can appear perfect before our Heavenly Father!

Wow, whatta God I serve!  And on those 2nd Friday of the month there is no other place I'd rather be! Although I am thankful I get to go home afterward.