Emmanuel, God With Me - Christmas Vignettes 04/12/20

Welcome to Christmas Vignettes 2020, a short daily reflection on Christmas and its meaning for Christians

Can I ask you an honest question? And do you promise to think about it and answer it for yourself? My question is, do you ache in your heart to be heard? Do you need someone to listen to you? And not just any old someone, but someone significant? 


Within me I have a hunger, a longing so strong that it’s like a pain I feel within the deepest part of myself. It’s the longing not to live anonymously, as if I were a ghost that temporarily haunts the earth and then disappears forever like a morning mist. I want to be real. I don’t want to just be, I want to be, meaningfully. And the only way that I can be such is by being known by someone that truly matters. I need to be present to someone else, someone that will be with me. How does that saying go... If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it… If I exist, but only in isolation, do I even exist at all?


Can you understand that? My longing for God in my life isn’t just so that I have someone who’s got my back, someone who will protect me and keep me safe and give me good things and make me #blessed. Those are nice, but this hunger I have is deeper than that. I don’t need God for his gifts, I need him for his presence. I need Him, and nothing else will do. I need his face, his gaze, his approval, his recognition, his acknowledgement. And absent that, I am living in hell. 


“Cast me not away from Thy presence” (Psalm 51.11)


Dear God, don’t turn your face from me! Don’t withdraw, because I only make sense in relation to you. How long, O Lord? How long, until you draw near, until I can have a beatific vision of the divine? 


“For unto us a child is born

Emmanuel has come on Christmas morn”


Emmanuel means “God with us”. The meaning of Christmas is that the divine entered a broken and hopeless world to give people the hope of him. To known and be known by God and have your identity found in him, there is no greater gift. Jesus was born into the world to know you, to enter your experience. In him, you are not no one. In him you are heard and seen. Celebrate him this Christmas.

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