Can you believe it?

Found this cute little article by someone who calls themselves "Divine Caroline" on the beta version of the new age spirituality website, intent.com.

It made me smile because I really like it when some of the sillier aspects of the Christmas story are shown to be...well.... very silly!

Laughed my head off about Mary being "preggers" trying to ride a donkey!

Exactly! *Applause*

The POINT to the reason I celebrate Christmas, and for the millions of Christians around the world who share this belief system with me, is that the wisdom and graciousness of God is way more incomprehensible than the collective wisdom and graciousness of humanity.

We can't "get" God's perverse and counter-intuitive actions in the world, both the miraculous and the mundane, then or now. Nothing God does, ever really makes total sense in the moment, but it does tend to make sense a whole lot later on.

What man breaks, God restores, just not always from our immediate vantage point and in accordance with our sense of propriety either. We can complain as loudly as we like about when and how God "should" intervene, and he might do that occasionally. We can, and often do, complain when God's interventions don't follow our plans or don't make sense to us. We tend to - very quickly - forget God's interventions when they happen to suit us very well.

The thing is, we can't see the whole story because we can only ever belong to the chapter we are living. God isn't being precious, mean or prevaricating towards us, he just has inside info we cannot yet know.

Two thousand years after the original Christmas Day (give or take 4 or 5 years either side of Year Zero and soooooo NOT December 25!), we look back and go "Aha!" at the birth of Christ, because what was an insignificant event in the view of humanity back then, became - and becomes to this day - a very significant global perspective indeed.

Somewhere around 33 AD with a brutal killing, followed quickly by a defiant metamorphosis from the tomb, God, the baby, became God the man and changed my life - your life - forever.

No Three Kings of the Orient...no non-crying babies in barns... no donkeys or cows, octopi or lobsters staring googly-eyed at a halo-lit mother and child... just God, present, among us, saving us from ourselves.

You won't believe it until you see it with God's eyes.