All is Calm

google image

Merry, merry Christmas to you, my friends!

And thank you, God, for Christmas.

I switched on my computer this morning and Microsoft Windows flashed the date, implicitly acknowledging what the Gospels and the history book both affirm: whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.

In the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, God who knows no before or after entered time and space. One who knows no boundaries at all took them on: the shocking confines of a baby's skin, the ominous restraints of mortality. "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation," an apostle would later say; "he is before all things, and in him all things hold together." But the few eyewitnesses on Christmas night saw none of that. They saw an infant struggling to work never-before-used lungs.

-- Philip Yancy, Finding God in Unexpected Places