Selah… pause and calmly think about this! (AMP, many Psalms)

This year’s holiday season has been different, both painful and monumental: empty seats at the table, adjustment to life with grown up kids, miracles in ministry, God’s generous provision… Life in this world is like that after all, a mix of good and hard. That’s what’s promised. In the middle of the painful stuff, God’s voice has shown up daily, moment by moment, in special ways that show me He’s present in all of it. Like parting clouds and a colorful, rain-free sky on Jed and Maggie’s wedding day, His light has entered the dark places and revealed the sweetest, most tender and powerful truths about His ways.

What strikes me this year, more than ever, is how our Savior came. I can’t get the wonder of it out of my head and everywhere I turn, there’s a beautiful reminder: friends announcing the birth of new grandchildren, nativity scenes, beautiful songs like “Mary Did You know?” and Francesca Battistelli’s “You’re Here.” The God of the Universe, entered humanity as an INFANT?! Think of that! If you’ve given birth, or even witnessed a baby being born, you know how messy it is, painful for the mother, and organically automatic for the infant. Fully formed in a tiny, squishy body, with a pliable skull, babies squeeze through a constricting tunnel and enter into oxygenated air fully dependent on the humans around them. They’re helpless, totally dependent, vulnerable, and lowly. The definition of lowly is “low in status or importance; humble.”

God could have entered humanity any other way, but He chose to be born like us and experience life as we have. He pooped and spit up, went through every developmental growth stage we did, experienced pain and emotions, yet never sinned. As we unpacked all of this with a friend recently, he held his year-old son in his arms and asked honestly, “Did Jesus seem different as a baby? If He was without sin, what did that look like as a baby? Crying is just communication… he must have cried. But what didn’t he do that other babies do?” Selah…

I encourage you to read Isaiah 9:3-7 in the Amplified Version. For brevity, I’ll just share verses two and six that were written and announced by the prophet Isaiah seven hundred years before the fulfillment of the promise,

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light; those who dwelt in the land of intense darkness and the shadow of death, upon them has the Light shined…For to us a Child is born, to us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace.”

Mary, the teenage mother of Jesus, knew this promise. It was familiar to her, passed on through her family for generations. Yet, consider how she must have felt when an angel approached her with the “good news” that she would carry the Everlasting Father of Eternity in her virgin womb! You can read the account of this conversation in Luke 1. Mary was perplexed at the how part of the plan and asked, “How will this be since I have no intimacy with any man as a husband?” (AMP, verse 34)

She wasn’t doubting that it would happen just as God had promised, she was asking how it would since there was no possible human way it could. After the angel explained the supernatural process (verse 35), it concluded with, “For nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment.” (verse 37)

Mary’s response was one I pray I can grow into with God, “I am the LORD’s ‘bondslave,’ let it be done to me as you have said.”

Human though she was, Mary believed God and trusted His plan. She basically submitted to the way God was going to come and save the world by saying, “Ok, God. I’ll do this scared.” (Tasha Layton on K-Love when a live request came in for her to sing Mary, Did you Know?)

So, what does it say to us that our Creator was born to save us? He was an infant, a toddler, a son, a brother, an adolescent… and yet He never sinned. Fully man, fully God.

For me, it tells me He gets it, EVERYTHING. He’s had poop all over him and depended on someone else for every need. He had to grow and develop, learn to walk, go through puberty. He had a long waiting time before He served in ministry, performed miracles, saved the world by dying on a Cross, and rose to life again. It was before He ever did any miracle as the Savior that He was baptized and God declared, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.”

I often struggle to trust God’s plan in the waiting part, the time between the promise and the fulfillment, the anxious tension in the things I cannot control. BUT GOD was born a baby and developed, he “took on flesh,” and in the fullness of time, He did every.single.thing He promised hundreds of years before! Maybe I can let go of the things in my life that I’m not in control of and trust this same God and Savior with those I love most. He gets it and He’s trustworthy!

So, my response to my Heavenly Father this Christmas as I celebrate Him being born an infant is, “LORD, I’ll trust you with this scared. I don’t see what you’re doing behind the scenes, but I know you’re there and I know you can and will keep every promise.”

“Noel, noel, God with us, Emmanuel.

You’re here, I’m holding You so near

I’m staring into the face of my Savior, King and Creator

You could’ve left us on our own, but You’re here, You’re here.”

May the wonder of this fill your heart this Christmas no matter your circumstances.