Thoughtful Thursday: What Child is This?

A Blessed Christmas Eve to One and All!

   This year, celebrating Christmas for the first time with a child of my own, I was thinking about the day to day reality of Christ becoming a little baby. An actual baby, not just a cherub on a card, a picture-perfect infant with a halo, but a real live newborn.

   Such practical questions as "How did Mary and Joseph wash the swaddling cloths?" and "Did they have multiple ones to use while the other ones dried?" have been circling in my mind.

   I get a more concrete sense of the Incarnation when remembering that Jesus would have cried, spit up, hiccupped, cooed, gooed, giggled, pooped explosively, pulled off the breast making milk spray everywhere, and made hilarious baby faces to the constant amusement of his parents.

   He became man. He took on our humanity and all the nitty gritty beautiful difficult mess that comes along with it. He jumped right into the thick of it, out of total and utter love. Right into our helplessness, our vulnerability, our weakness - starting as one of the tiniest and least, unable to control anything, even His own feeding or cleanliness.

   In the midst of whatever sufferings we are struggling with this season, here is the greatest consolation, that He is right here along with us, embracing our human condition with all His dear heart in order to raise us up with Him in the Resurrection. And there are baby smiles to delight along the way.