Thursday, December 22, 2011

A Christmas Thought

Since becoming a mother, so many aspects of my faith have shifted. Now that I have my own child...gosh, everything is different. To experience bearing a child...loving a child...failing my own flesh and blood by my own brokeness...sharing an intimacy and tenderness with this little one that I never knew possible...my world and my heart are forever changed.

By looking at my own child, I am often struck by what it means to be a child myself...a child of God. And as Christmas approaches, and Jesus' birth is near, I am amazed-and frankly, baffled at times, at God's boldness in sending His Son in the form of a child. This is the Lord of Heaven and Earth...He had to know what He was getting Himself into...and yet-- if He did, how could He have still chosen to do it? To send the Son of Man in the flesh of a little, tiny, helpless baby?!

So often I think I've sidestepped the reality of Jesus as a baby-- I've chosen to ignore His humanity and focus instead on the man that Jesus became--the Jesus of thirty-three years--Jesus on the cross. Jesus as a man-- yes, still God, but old enough to take care of Himself. Its so hard to believe that God sent Him in the form of a vulnerable, needy baby....that Mary, like any mother, felt her baby's flutters and then kicks...that Jesus, was always the Son of God, even as baby who perhaps wailed, just like my own child, to be fed, cleaned or simply to be held. Those cries, those needs, are not reflections of our broken world, but instead are simply the means by which children, even God, communicate.

When I think about this Father's choice to send His Son, I am baffled...humbled...perplexed...and in awe. How courageous. How trusting. How...divine. He sent His perfect creation into a world of imperfection-- of parents and friends and neighbors who He knew, without a doubt, would fail and hurt this child and then the man by the reality of their (and creation's brokenness (Jesus being left at the temple, anyone?)

How vastly different God must be to be able to operate in this way...to trust that all would not be lost with this Gift. And how much He must love us to make it all worth it.




Merry Christmas. 

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