A Christmas Miracle

It's snowing. Cinnamon raisin bread bakes in the oven behind me. N is upstairs in her crib - not sleeping, but content.

It's a rare moment to sit and reflect in the middle of holiday preparations.

When did Christmas start to mean making so many plans you meet yourself coming and going? We've got parties and presents, gatherings and goodies, cards and church. Preparation consumes days, evenings, lists, budgets.

Historically, Christmas was a mass, maybe with stockings stuffed with oranges and chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. People didn't plan holiday schedules months in advance. Sometimes, there weren't any gifts at all. Did they not know that Christmas is about the joy of giving and family togetherness? I guess Hallmark hadn't gotten that message to them yet.

Of course, if you want a party, you could go back to that first Christmas: the actual evening Jesus was born. There weren't shiny baby announcements printed by an online printer; but there were angels announcing his birth. There wasn't a baby shower; but there were those really rich guys who came months late with a fortune - not an exaggeration - in gifts.

Something big happened. Something to trigger heaven's hosts to sing. Something that would cause people - even people who don't actually profess faith - millennia later to pause their usual lives and acknowledge a peculiarity in the day.

It wasn't family togetherness. Joseph and Mary don't seem to have been welcome with their families back in Nazareth.

It wasn't the joy of giving. Those smelly shepherds who showed up that night probably didn't leave anything behind them other than a pungent odor.

It was Emmanuel. "God with us."

What's the big deal about that?

Do you realize that every other religion on the face of the earth is an attempt by man to reach god(s)? Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam . . . even some that borrow language from Christianity and encourage their people to read the Bible, they're all a story of men striving to make themselves right. People trying to approach God through working, praying, fasting, denying themselves, traveling to holy places. They know something stands between man and God, and they do everything humanly possible to get past that or to outweigh it with "good" things so God will approve of them.

Christmas is a big deal because that is when God gave us the gift we never saw coming: He came to us.

Emmanuel.

God with us.

No more striving. No more analyzing whether we've done more good than bad. No more comparing and wondering and worrying. God reached down, became a man, so he could die. So he could rise. So he could obliterate death and sin.

Not so the good works would outweigh the bad, but so that the bad would die - poof - gone.
Not so we could get to God, but so that God could live in us.
Not so we could do good things, but so that God could act through us.
Not so we could have a good life, but so that we could live eternally.

If that's not a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:9-13 ESV

My Recent Reads

I love to read books.

Fiction, non-fiction. Historic, current. Local, foreign. Give me a book with a decent storyline and an eloquent author and I can get lost for hours. Am I crabby? Let me read for a while and I'll be better. Am I bored? Usually a book can get me through. Am I happy? I'll celebrate by curling up in an easy chair with my paper-and-ink companion.

I'm not a snob about genre, but I do perhaps achieve a measure of snobbery when it comes to content. (1) I don't want cookie-cutter plotlines. If I can guess the ending in the first chapter, it's not going to hold a ton of appeal for me. (2) The characters have to be relatable: not stunningly gorgeous, impeccably witty, or astonishingly wealthy. (3) The author must, must, MUST display a reasonable command of the English language. No matter how good the story or characters, misspelled words and glaring grammatical errors are fingernails on the chalkboard of my - well, you get the idea.

So, with all that out in the open, you may better understand my delight to come across not one but two excellent reads in the last few weeks.

The first was "The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels" by Janet Soskice (Chatto & Windus, 2009). Here lives the tale of two middle-aged women in Victoria's Great Britain, a time when women didn't generally hold their own property or get degrees at universities, and a time when rationalism and Darwinism were eroding confidence in the reliability of Scripture. Agnes and Margaret, devout Presbyterians, inherit their father's entire estate (yes, making them fabulously wealthy, yet they're still human, sibling squabbles and social blunders remain unvarnished). Because they believe that their wealth is a gift from God for a specific purpose, and because they've also been gifted with a penchant for learning languages, they head to the Middle East in search of ancient biblical manuscripts. Their journey leads them to the recovery of the oldest copy of the four gospels found to that point in time. The discovery reestablished the perseverance of the integrity of the Scriptures through time and laid to rest the concern that the gospels were a collection of oral traditions compiled hundreds of years after the life of Christ.

This story drew me in and held me. My lasting impression was that of awe; God will preserve His word, keeping the secret things hidden and preserved (sometimes for centuries) until the day they are required to once again assure His faithful that, yes, His word is truth. If non-fiction as a genre tends to turn you away, please try again with this one. It reads like a novel, yet it is all delightfully true.

The second book also happened to be non-fiction. "Juniper: The Girl Who was Born Too Soon" by Kelley and Thomas French (Back Bay Books, 2017) relates the story of a woman who has always believed she would have a daughter. Though she didn't play with dolls or set up a make-believe house when she was little, she has never wavered in this conviction. When she eventually marries Thomas and they experience infertility, she pursues treatment as if her daughter is waiting for her to simply get it right so she can join their family. Through IVF, they do finally conceive, but when their daughter is born at 23 weeks gestation, they have to make some heart-rending decisions. (23 weeks is perilously close to the age of viability as accepted by many medical practitioners. Many doctors would not feel morally obligated to intervene to save a child born at this age.) They decide to let their daughter decide: as she displays a tenacious hold on life, they pursue treatment for her, spending months in the NICU at the side of her bassinet. As one thing after another goes wrong, they face the reality that they may lose her before she sees their faces (she was born before the eyelids are slit to enable them to open), before they ever hear her voice (she breathes with a ventilator because her lungs aren't fully developed), before she feels the sun on her skin.

While I was reduced to a sobbing mess at several points, the authors, who are themselves journalists, achieve a balance of hope in their retelling. Thomas begins reading the Harry Potter series to little Juniper, providing a number of heart-warming - even funny - passages. Their primary nurse begins providing little, light-hearted outfits (XXS pet costumes!) once Juniper makes it past the initial critical days.

I was awed once more by the intricacies of the creation of life. The authors, one admittedly without a faith and the other a lapsed Catholic, reflect several times on divine matters and, while blatantly liberal, a decidedly pro-life message emerges. There were even snippets that approached a devotional tone, in the Kuyperian Reformed tradition of "All truth is God's truth." Kelley writes, "On matters of faith, Tom and I had little clarity. But we were forced to ask ourselves if we had been part of a miracle. If, beyond all expectation, a God that neither of us had served well had given us a gift we did not deserve" (p. 301).

Not that this volume is squeaky clean. There's some language. The story of their relationship naturally models itself along cultural norms. Their experiences with IVF, an understandably delicate topic, are discussed frankly. Yet, for the more mature reader, I recommend "Juniper." And if you just can't bring yourself to crack open the cover of a book, you can check out a greatly abbreviated version (recorded before they decided to write their book) on RadioLab.