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| “Adoration of the Shepherds” by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622 |
My heart won’t rest in the manger is year.
It’s been a hard month and my prayers can’t seem to stay with Baby Jesus. I long for the powerful God made man, not the baby that will grow up to one day be the Lord of lords and King of kings.
But like Mary, who wondered how God would become a baby, her baby, I need to stare into that feed trough full of life and face my own confusion.
This Christmas, a feeling of peace is not what I need, nor is it a joyful heart. I hunger for more of God.
It all still begins in that little baby, though, doesn’t it? I can’t pass by Him, discount the wonder, the power, the majesty of who He really is.
If Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, then the hope of the world is always bound up in that baby Jesus.
I don’t need the baby to grow up so He can answer my great need.
No, I need to grow up and remember He already answered my greatest need.
It’s been eighteen years since I fell in love with Jesus, and I am standing in only inches of His great love for me.
But it’s Christmas now, and Jesus can be born afresh in our hearts.
I have decided to empty out all the old. I am purging my heart of old love, old wine, old scriptures, old Christmas emotions.
Like a pregnant mama, I am nesting, making space for life to begin anew.
I want baby Jesus in ways that my words can’t quite explain.
I can hedge around my feelings, poke at them with poetic thoughts, sing them with words no one understands.
But this longing wells up in a gut-wrenching sob and the tears flow so fast I can’t hold them back.
And then the gratitude fills me. I am so grateful to serve a God who can meet even these deep hopes for more.
Living water that never runs dry flows from that manger to the cross and the hard truth stares at me that God became a man because we are a mess without Him, a hopeless unredeemable cause but for His sacrifice.
What kind of God does that?
There He is asleep in Mary’s arms. God with us, alongside us, amidst us in the hardness of even this season. She carried Him and yet it is Jesus who truly bears all of us.
At last, I look in wonder at the baby Jesus and find Christmas is all as it should be.
