This month a Jack in the Box fast food restaurant is opening in Carol Stream. I remember this place from growing up in California. Instead of the sleek purple and red logo of today, back then part of the signage was a giant three-dimensional clown’s head that looked down at the parking lot. Seems like part of a bad horror movie.

My first job interview took place at a Jack in the Box. We sat there at a table in the restaurant and the interviewer asked me “Why do you want a career with Jack?” It was probably not a great idea to edit the question of an interviewer. But I replied, “I don’t want a career; I just want a job for the summer.” The second thing I remember is that I didn’t get the job. These two memories may be connected. They were looking for a career man, and I wasn’t looking for a career.

Seeing that new Jack in the Box under construction brings me back to the clown head of childhood.

I remember learning to walk, and my head seemed heavy, like the muscles in my neck struggled to keep it upright. I must have had some balance issues. I remember being frustrated because I kept losing my balance. This gingerly balanced head of mine was going to wobble left or right or back and forth and keep me from standing straight, the weight of it with every step shifting to a side where I didn’t want it to go, and then I was on the floor, standing up to try again.

And then there was speech. Words on my tongue spoken to those around me seem to have always been there. Figuring out how to make sound. Speaking new sounds and words, body and mouth as a sound-making instrument, every sentence a sort of song or aural experiment.

Then came reading. It's harder for me to remember when I could not read because I have come to think of it as a part of who I am. My reading defines me. Your reading defines you. Learning this skill happened in school for me, first and second grade perhaps? Well, I guess it also happened at home where curiosity got the better of me. What were these symbols?

Before I could walk or speak or read, before I could work, before most of the stuff of life, God was there. He wasn’t in the work or the words. He wasn’t in the catechism or the creed. When people look to find him in things, they’ll come up empty. But God wasn’t just present; he was close. Even though I didn’t realize it, he was beyond-imagination close.

And yet he was also strangely unknown. Sin comes too early to remember. Before we know what sin is, it’s there. It doesn’t seem like sin. It just seems like normal. Even as a child, anger turns into the tantrum. The desire to do what I’ve just been told not to do. My urges controlling, not knowing the limits or knowing and not caring. Slapping another child just to hear the sound of my hand against another’s face. I like the way that sounds. Do it again. Mom says one thing, I do another.

With sin came pain. The forbidden cookie. A pinch from another kid hurts. If you fall on the playground, you become familiar with the scrape of sin, the bloody nose, a bruise, a scrape, a burn, applying pressure to help the bleeding stop and the body beginning to heal itself. Amazing and ordinary. That’s how natural a part of us is sin.

The most elemental memories in all of life are none of these. They are not even about me. Here they are:

When Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”

God came incarnate. He grew like we did, learning to walk and talk and read and work. Yet he did not sin. His Father was close, so close. He saw what we cannot see. He looked into the heart of every me. As elemental as sin was to us, that’s how no sin was to him.

Nothing and no one else could do what he did and what he does. It was a horrible road to death made worse and best because he had no sin and took on ours. He made the “me” of each become the “one” of us.

Father, maker of goodness, ever-giving, knowing, loving, you sent the only one who could rescue and made a place even for me at the table.

Incarnate Son—elemental, primal, personal, eternal, Jesus, you came to know and live and be with us, to die for us and live again.

Spirit, now and today at this moment, you give both solitude and never-aloneness, going on and going together, not alone.

“This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 1 Corinthians 11:24b-25b

When we come to the life of the wedding feast, when we live the eternal life, we have to learn everything over—walking, talking, reading, working, living not for ourselves but for Jesus and for others, remembering to remember, looking back but also ahead, not for a season, but a career calling for all of life, a call beyond life, a life in him, alive in him, this meal and person and Savior that was and is and is to come.