Robin writes.... I can clearly remember each occasion when my three children were born. I was there throughout the whole , rather messy, delivery and birth process. I watched as those tiny new born babies emerged into the world, kicking and screaming and doing what new borns do. For those of you who have been through the same experience you will know what an emotional event it is for both parents. There is the amazement of seeing something so small and helpless yet so perfectly and completely formed. There is the feeling that - "wow! this is ours! " And there is the feeling "help! what do we do now?" The whole business is wonderful, delicate, sensitive, and simultaneously totally frightening.

So I wonder then, if that is what it is like for new life to appear in our families, why did God choose that particular highly charged human experience to reveal himself? Why choose the helplessness of the newly born to show us what he is like. Why come to earth as a 3 kg bundle of wriggling screaming flesh? Why come to earth in such a vulnerable, weak, beautiful way? Why?

I can only begin to hint at an answer. Maybe it has something to do with beauty. Parents always believe that their new born child is the most beautiful being on earth. They genuinely believe that. Maybe God loves beauty too and behaves in ways that cause one to draw breath and stand back in amazement. His only son appearing as an infant - is that not a beautiful thing to happen? 
Maybe also it has something to do with weakness and helplessness. In coming to earth as a child God was identifying with the weak vulnerability of all of us. Underneath our confident adult smiles there is, usually, a weak person who needs the comfort and reassurance of others. God knows that. So when he sent Jesus - Emmanuel, God with us - he was in effect saying I know what you are really like, but you can trust me because I have been in that place too. Let us pray that during this advent season as we prepare for the coming of Jesus, we will be able to enter more fully into a relationship with the beautiful risk taking God who shares his life with ordinary people like us.

Yours in Christ

Robin 



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