Advent 2016 Day 8
Lindsay Norris is a young, oncology nurse with a three-year-old son and seven-month-old daughter. By all accounts, she is a caring person and loves her husband, her children and her job. But recently, according to her blog post dated November 14, something jarred her life in a way she never thought would happen.
She was diagnosed with colorectal cancer.
Immediately, Lindsay was thrust into a world she had walked in… but by her own account, “I didn’t get it.” And so with her post Lindsay bared her soul… and offered every patient she had ever treated an apology. “I didn’t understand,” she wrote. “Now I do. And I’m sorry.”
If Christmas means what we believe it does, according to the Scriptures, it was God’s way of saying to us, “I understand.” “I get it.” No one can say that God is somehow disconnected… somehow “out there” and separated from our pain. “Surely He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows,” the prophet Isaiah said.
In other words, He gets it. He understands the experiences of humanity, from the discomfort of a wet diaper as an infant in Bethlehem to the extremity of an unjust death as a crucified and tortured man. And everything in between.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin,” we read in Hebrews 4:15.
What does Christmas mean? It means that God gets it… all of it. He walked and He walks where you are today.
And He will never, ever have to say… “I’m sorry.”
FOR MEDITATION: For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Hebrews 2:17
FOR REFLECTION: As you stand quietly looking at your nativity scene, imagine and thank God for the love it took for God to come as a baby… and “be made like them fully human.”
