A New Eden

The world wants us in the inn, away from home for Christmas, but home is exactly what's happening just a few breaths away in the manger. 

In the basement of that too-full inn, where the animals, too, were packed in tight and sharing some hay and grasses, there comes to us a baby. Jesus. The Messiah. 

Immanuel. 

Do you know what Immanuel means? It means "home." 

Okay, technically, it means "God with us," but in the grand scheme of things, it means home. 

It means home because this is the way that it was meant to be. Remember all the way back in the beginning, there was formless and void. Then, there was darkness and light, earth and water, night and day, mountains and valleys and oceans, birds and creatures, then man...and God. In the beginning, after God formed and filled the earth, He walked with us in the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve, when they sinned and ate the fig, hid because they heard His footsteps. God cast them out of the Garden, and they no longer walked with Him. 

But that was always the plan. The plan was for us to walk with Him. 

When sin separated us, we no longer walked together. Christmas...changes all of that.

Look at it - here is a baby in a manger, the Son of God, God Himself incarnate. He has a body, a physical body. He has a voice and eyes and ears and feet. He's come to walk with us again. 

In the manger, there is Eden. There is a perfect creation once more, if only for a single, crying breath, and all of a sudden, God is walking with us again, and we with Him, and there is this overwhelming sense of home. Of the way things were meant to be. Of the space that is ours to inhabit. Of things being just the way we like them, the way we function so well. 

We are right where we are supposed to be. 

That's home. 

And if the world can keep you so busy and so overwhelmed and so noised-out and shouted-down in the inn for this season, it knows you'll never make it to the manger and you'll never know what "home" feels like, even when it's right there in the flesh, and when the calendar flips just that one more day, that one small, seemingly insignificant day, and the noise settles down and the inn starts to empty, you will settle - happily - for what you always had: a very small space in this great big world, complete with chores to be done, bills to be paid, miles to be driven, and prayers to be prayed. You'll settle for your cozy bed and your tiny cubicle and your little car, and you'll be happy with it because it will feel so much like the very thing you've been longing for this entire season from the inn. 

But it will still be such a shallow substitute, and in the depths of your soul, you'll know it. You'll know you've missed something, something important. 

Won't you?