Let It Be So

Jesus lay in a manger, totally dependent on human beings to provide his basic human needs. The Author of the Universe had a bed of straw, was a blanket’s protection away from dying of cold exposure in the chill Middle Eastern night, had a common laborer to lead and protect his family, to guide his upbringing, to be the husband to the mother of God.


Jesus, for the moment, was out of control, totally dependent upon God the Father providing for His needs. When Herod was a threat, God used Joseph and Mary to carry Him to safety in Egypt. When that threat passed, God used them to teach Jesus the fundamentals of growing in wisdom in the culture of the Chosen people. When Jesus stayed behind in the Temple while His family traveled back home to Nazareth God used the experience to open the eyes and hearts of Jesus’ earthly family to His eventual mission, and perhaps, to educate the young Jesus in being responsible to His earthly family.


But it all began with the helpless babe. God incarnate did not descend in adult form, ready to take on the evil of the world as an omniscient and omnipotent King. He came as a babe, and God ordained that coming.

If God trusted His Son to an earthly entry of the most poor and tenuous sort, trusted His upbringing to imperfect humans, trusted that He would recognize His identity and submit Himself to the Father, trusted that He would be obedient and die the death so that God could raise Him from the grave…..

Why do I doubt that my circumstances are beyond God’s control? Why do I become anxious over the routine daily roadblocks that happen in my life and in the life of every human being with the capacity to know they exist? Why do I fear the outcome of things over which I have no control, things over which the God Who oversaw the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is in total control?

Did He not see you and me as babes? Did He not provide for our sustenance through the humans that cared for us? Did He not give us minds to learn, emotions to love and be loved, spirits to seek, and souls to be saved by His grace? Can we not look back and see our “escapes to Egypt”, our moments of learning from irresponsible behavior, our epiphanies, our fulfilled prophecies, our realizations of the promises He has kept?

Do I really want to persist in trying to control the uncontrollable, to anticipate the unknowable, to prevent the inevitable, to deny that apparent mortality followed by an inescapable immortality is the fate of all, that God’s grace, once received is not revocable but a seal of life, that God’s grace persistently rejected is not recoverable, but a seal of eternal separation from all that is love?

Crumble my pride, break my rebellious spirit, bring me back to the attitude of the babe in arms: dependence, humility, openly loving and desiring to be loved, needing relationship, first with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then with all who will be in relationship with me. Abba, Father, let it be so. Amen.