Everything Holds Together in Him

Once, there was a letter.

A man named Paul wrote it, far away, with chains on his wrists. He wrote it to a little church in a town called Colossae, to people he had never even met. People who were a bit afraid.

They were starting to wonder. The world felt so big, so loud, so full of things that pushed and pulled. Who was holding it all? Was anyone? Or was everything just spinning and spinning, with no one in the middle?

Do you ever feel that way, like the world is wobbling and you cannot find the center of it?

Paul knew that feeling. So he picked up his pen, and he told them about Jesus.

"When you want to know what God is like," Paul wrote, "look at Jesus. He is the One you cannot see, made close enough to touch."

And then Paul wrote something almost too big to hold.

Everything was made by him. Everything. The mountains and the minnows, the far white stars and the small brown sparrow, the kings on their thrones and the things your eyes can never see. All of it. He thought of it, and spoke it, and there it was.

Then came the line Paul wanted every frightened heart in Colossae to hold onto.

In him, all things hold together.

It means the world is not spinning loose. It is not falling. There are two strong, gentle hands underneath everything, and they have never once let go. The same hands that made the stars are holding you, right now, tonight. You are not too small for him to notice. You are not too far for him to reach.

Everything leans on him. He is the center the whole wide world was made to rest on.

Paul kept writing, because the world had broken. It had wandered off, far from home, like a sheep in the dark. The people reading the letter had wandered too. And so had I. And so, sometimes, have you.

So Jesus did something only the center of everything could do.

He gathered up all the broken, wandered, far-off things, and he carried them home through his own cross. He made peace. He brought the lost ones back, because he loved them and would not come home without them.

Once you were far away, Paul said. And now? Now you are brought near. Now you are held.

That little church was small and afraid. But the One holding the stars was holding them too, gathering them, and you, into one whole family.

Picture them, somewhere in Colossae, crowded around one page while a friend reads it aloud by lamplight. Chains on the hand that wrote it. Stars steady outside the window. And nothing in all that spinning, wonderful world able to shake them loose from the hands that made it.