The Astonishing Event

God. the Creator, the One who spoke into nothing and made everything...

God, had everything been leading up to this?  It was so radical that nobody would have thought to even wonder if it might be possible.  So fantastic, so incomprehensible a move this would be, that all the hinting in the world couldn’t have brought it to mind for anyone.  It was inconceivable. Ludicrous, even. Unthinkable, Impossible.

Ah, but remember? Impossibility is God’s most favorite territory, this Artist’s most preferred medium.

And so the time came for her to deliver.

The time came for the timeless one to enter time.  For the Creator to get created.  To go from beyond to being, from apart to within.  From invincible to oh, so very vulnerable.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, nothing, nothing.  

Nothing would be allowed any longer to separate God from the ones God loves.  

No more.  

This is it. 

How to prepare? What will it feel like?  

To be one of them, with them, so completely, to dwell within, inhabit, to become flesh. To see human life from the inside, to taste and smell all the things they do, to touch them, to cry the tears of your image-bearers…

Conceiving of it all was one thing.  

Creating it, imagining what they would need, how they would live, and making them for it, watching them in their joy and their struggle, enjoying them and grieving with them, and wishing, always yearning, to be closer, to be connected.  But making it all, seeing it all.  That was one thing.  And that was something.  That was something indeed.  But this, to be what you made –to join them there, to share it all, this is something else entirely.

And now the moment was here. Finally here. God must have been giddy.

And then it happened.  

In pain and confusion, a collision of fear and joy, raw animal instinct and desperate human ingenuity, the extraordinary, ordinary, astonishing event occurred.

I wonder what it was like to draw that first breath? To smell the sharp scent of animals and hear the cacophony of creature sounds and the gentle voices giving you your name.  To feel the scratchy hay, the soft bands of cloth, the strong arms holding you steady, the kiss of a father’s beard, the thump of a mother’s heart beating against your brand new cheek.

But then, no new baby remembers their first things, do they?

The barrier is broken, people. God has come. 

The world will never be the same. 

And neither will God.