Christmas Baby

This day has been a lazy one: sleep in, eat, make morning tea, check email. Crazy week at the office, and I took a day off on Wed. to be at a birth in Tri-Cities. It was amazing, intense, exhilarating, made me teary-eyed (or maybe that was the effect of staying up most of the night-babies never seem to come at normal hours).
I was prepared for the intensity, the long hours, the strange facts about birth. I wasn't prepared to see my friend change so quickly from a woman laboring through a hard birth to a peaceful mother holding her child. There is something completely disarming about a baby being held by its mother. It can make baby-talking idiots of the most serious of us. It cuts us deep, somewhere that we don't understand. You can't argue with it or even explain it. But nothing else on earth can compare to it.
Perhaps that is why Christ came to earth in such a way. The Jews were living under harsh Roman rule, a conquered people descended from a powerful nation. Likely, many of them were bitter, wanting a Messiah to come and exact vengeance. God sent a baby, a tiny, helpless infant. As Dr. Leithart might say, it was subversive. It turned the presuppositions of these weary-eyed Messiah seekers upside down.