This Christmas as I celebrate with my sweet family for the last time as a family of four I can't help but look back with nostalgia. As I ponder Christmas past, a couple particular years stand out to me above the rest.
Christmas 1988. I was nine and my brother was five. We woke up Christmas morning and went to church and passed out blue "It's a boy!!" bubble gum cigars to everyone in celebration of our brand new baby brother born late afternoon on Christmas Eve. My mom was still in the hospital so my dad managed to get my brother and I up and ready for church and out the door AND HE PREACHED after having been at the hospital all day and into the night with my mom the previous day! (As a parent of a nine and five year old this year, I am newly impressed that my dad pulled all this off by himself!!) We rushed home from church, quickly gathered up all of our presents and went to the hospital to open them with mom and the new baby.
The less obvious Christmas miracle here is that a nine year old girl and a five year old boy cared very little about their presents that year. They were enamored with this tiny creature in a big red stocking!! (As a side note...that baby is celebrating his 25th birthday today and he has grown up to be a wonderful brother and friend to me and an amazing uncle to my kids!! I'm so thankful for Christmas Eve 1988!!)
Christmas 2004. I had a six and half week old daughter and was in the midst of that exhausted joyfulness that is adjusting to first time motherhood. I remember having a renewed sense of awe for exactly what Jesus did in becoming a baby and being born in a stable. I mean WHOA. I remember pondering silly things like "I wonder if baby Jesus spit up this much...." and "I wonder when his umbilical stump fell off...." and "I wonder when he slept through the night...." Awe. The humanity of God. He lowered himself to become the most dependent and helpless creature on the planet. I can't fathom it. (I also can't fathom what it was like to have been his mother. I really want to hear some stories from Mary when I get to heaven!)
Jasmine Grace, 2004
Christmas present 2013. As I prepare to leave my comfortable home in a few months to go to a foreign land and bring home a little boy who didn't ask me to come, I am again struck with wonder at what Christ did for me. Caleb has been in an orphanage all of his short life. He doesn't have a concept of family. He doesn't know he needs one. He doesn't know us and he doesn't love us. But we love him. Oh how we love that boy! We are preparing a place in our family and in our home for him. He has siblings and grandparents and a whole extended family who love him and are anxiously awaiting his homecoming. Someday hopefully he will love us back...but this isn't a partnership. We aren't going because we are heroes or because someday he will thank us or because we want something from him in return...we are going because we LOVE him!!! The rest is irrelevant.
While I was still mired in sin and didn't know I needed a savior and had no concept of Heaven, Christ came for me. He stepped out of a perfect home and came to this messed up planet because he LOVED me! He became human...experiencing acne and the stomach virus and ridicule and exhaustion and loss of loved ones and body odor and misunderstandings and hurt feelings and injustice and poverty and hunger and the list goes on....because of LOVE! His first bed was a feeding trough and he spent thirty three years walking toward a torturous death so he could adopt me into his forever family.
4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.[b] 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba,[c] Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
Galations 4:4-7
Christmas changes everything. I've been rescued. I have hope. I'm an heir to heaven. Because of a helpless baby who grew up and saved the world and reigns now and forever.
Merry Christmas!!
