A Singular Anticipation of Christmas–Day 4

It sounds crazy, but a baby can make us all children again – Jason Gray

 

I’ve been blessed to realize something about Christmas.  The only thing more joyous than experiencing Christmas as a child is experiencing Christmas with your own child.  So far this Christmas season I’ve watched the boys wrestle Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in Home Depot.  I’ve seen them sink a sturdy pine branch to the ground under the weight of a half dozen ornaments they decided all looked best on a single branch.  Or maybe it was the largest branch they could reach.  I’ve watched them curled up on the couch each night listening to Katie read them Christmas stories.  Several times already this Christmas season I’ve thought: oh to be a child again.

I’m going to confess something.  There have been many times I’ve questioned God’s timing in sending a child to earth.  His child.  I’ve actually questioned why he decided to send his Son at all.  If I was God, and I was going to reveal myself to the world, I would have gone about it a bit differently.  More dramatic.  I would have waited until someone invented Twitter.  Then I would have tweeted something like: World.  This is God.  In five minutes it is going to start raining.  Green rain.. After about five minutes I’d have begun dousing the world in non-lethal doses of pea green rain.  For about forty days and forty nights.  Then I would have tweeted: I’m going to stop now.  And instantly green rain would once again be yellow sun.  I’m sure the twitter handle @God would have suddenly had quite the Twitter following.

But maybe God’s mission statement was never as much about proving his existence to us as it was about revealing his love for us.  Maybe he knew it would be a much greater miracle granting what we so often long for in our adult lives but find as impossible as green rain to find – a return to the innocence of our childhoods.  The time before we littered our lives with countless mistakes and broken relationships.

Too often, maybe, we allow our failures to convince us our childhood Christmases were more stories than memories.  Today I wonder if God didn’t send a Baby, his Baby, to remind us that there is a pathway between this Christmas and our first one.  And that he would love to escort us back there, passing over our debris as if he couldn’t see it – and then beyond. To the first Christmas.  To the home of innocence and purity.  To a child in a manger.