Down

I stood outside the nativity scene. The snow fell soft, the lights from the manger glowed orange, and all was silent beside me. The wonder of Christmas has followed me through my life. My parents threw away the commercial aspects of the holiday and left me with raw Christmas. To them, Christmas was a holiday as holy as Easter.


"God came down to us,” My mom, a first-generation believer, told me one Christmas Eve as we had stopped exactly here in front of this same nativity so many years ago. 

"One night,” she said, ”It was over. God had enough of watching us struggle and suffer in our sin. And so, one night, He came to get us Himself.”  

I was too young to embrace what mom was saying then fully, but tonight I stood and wept. I was tired. Mom was gone now. I had come home from  Mongolia to meet her at the end of her cancer road. The funeral was over, and it was time to return to the mission. I cried at the nativity for so many things. The years in Mongolia had hurt. They had hurt my heart in ways I may never be able to express. Poverty, suffering were my everyday experiences. At times I wondered if I could see anything else, anything worse, and then I would.

 In all the ways the mission field had created me, it had also ruined me. 
I knew I had to get on a plane and return to Mongolia in just a few short days. I was disturbed by the sinking feeling in my gut. I didn't want to go back. Nearly eight thousand miles between myself and our mission field had numbed the sorrow a bit. How was I ever again going to enter into that level of misery willingly? All these thoughts brought me here, back here to this nativity on the side of a country road. I hoped the farmer who put the nativity out each year since my childhood would still have kept with the tradition, and he did—finding the familiar nativity felt stabilizing in the middle of such inner turmoil.

"I don't know how to do it anymore, God.”
 

Silence. 

" I don't think I have what it takes anymore." 

My mind drifted back to standing there by the same nativity with mom.

 "Shari,” she had said, "Imagine it, that night, that little baby cry.... can you imagine the night God came down...what did that cry sound like?" 

God came down, down to our pain, down to our suffering, down to our mess, to be with us. And likely, the first thing he did was cry. 

One night, it was over. A baby's cry pierced the air, and it was over. We would never be alone again. 

I can't imagine a greater act of mercy. I wiped my tears with my coat sleeve and drove home to pack.