Merry Christmas 2007

Imagine you agree to have yourself, your soul, your immaterial essence, all your thoughts and experiences and hard-won lessons, all your knowledge and vocabulary and understanding, all your memories -- to have all that put into the body of a newborn baby. To be raised by your own children, if you have them. Or maybe your younger siblings. You can't talk, you can't move, feed yourself. You must depend upon them utterly to feed you, clean you, keep you safe. You have to be taught things you already know, maybe even things you yourself invented or devised.... Imagine that and you have some vague inkling of what it was like for God the Son to take on the form of a man. Starting with babyhood.

It's not the best analogy because Jesus became fully human in his humanity and had to learn like any other baby, so it wasn't as if there was a fully mature "soul" in the baby Jesus. But the deity part of Him was still there, the power that holds the universe together, and He voluntarily put aside the use of it, and also the privileges of treatment and respect that go with deity to become a human baby. A creature that in those first few weeks couldn't even roll over! It's mind boggling what He did. For us.

I pray that as the Christmas season enfolds us, you’ll take time to reflect on the significance behind this. That He temporarily set aside his privileges as deity to take on the form of a baby, grow to manhood and lay down his life for us on a Roman cross some 2000 years ago. Jesus Christ, the only true celebrity, our hero and savior, born to die so we might live forever. May His love and life touch your heart in a special way this Christmas.

I'll be back blogging again sometime after the first of the new year. See you then.

Karen