A baby. In a feeding trough. In the middle of the night.
We make it look all pretty, don’t we?
But the rough, raw truth of it – a young teenage girl traveling miles on a donkey to a town she didn’t know with the man who wasn’t yet her husband to give birth with animals in the dirt is as simplistic as it gets. No hotel with room service. No service at all. Just some straw. No midwife or hospital. A young woman giving birth with no one to attend her except a man. At that time, in that culture, the entire situation would have been embarrassing.
Can we say “awkward”?
Why a baby?
Why didn’t God sweep down from his heavenly throne and announce himself with trumpets so we’d be sure to recognize him? Why enter the world on a donkey with a donkey to a girl, not a queen?
God uses the simple things to confound the “wise.”
He wants us to love him not explain with our human reasoning why and how he can’t possibly exist. We’re intelligent. Created in his image means we have the capacity for so much creation, discovery, and understanding if we are yielded to him. But when we rely on ourselves, we miss all there is thinking that we know all there is. We only see a small part of who God is and become puffed up in pride.
I know this. I can do this. I have to figure this out. I can tell you what’s best.
Or maybe it’s as simple as God bringing Jesus into the world the same way he began the world.
What if he knew we would never be able to love him, ourselves, and others without us receiving his love first? What if Jesus coming to us humbly as a baby without claiming his creative, God rights was to show us how simple it really is to receive his love?
His love that makes a way for us to be in relationship with him for eternity – because he is beyond time.
Could it be that simple?
Laura Bennet - Author 