Merry Christmas!

Welcome to our Christmas Blog! We pray you are encouraged during this Advent season and it helps to keep Christ aflame in your heart. I love Christmas for all the reasons we call it a "magical time." I love decorating, the music, shopping for loved ones, cookies and baking, parties, and now with my own children, making family traditions that bring us together. Most importantly, I realize the awesome wonder of the season because it begins and ends with Jesus Christ. It is His birthday we are celebrating. So for me, when I think about all the "magical" things this season brings I try to keep this perspective:  it is a season to prepare for the birthday of our King. So, pull out the finest china, the brightest lights, the most exquisite paper, the prettiest music, and all things glorious because this is a time meant for royalty.

Advent means "coming". It is the season in which we wait for the wonderful coming of Christ. To wrap our minds around the incarnation St. Athanasius has the most wonderful book titled "On the Incarnation'. One of my favorite quotes in the book is:

"As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God. If they be of man, then let him scoff; but if they -be of God, let him not mock at things which are no fit subject for scorn, but rather let him recognise the fact and marvel that things divine have been revealed to us by such humble means, that through death deathlessness has been made known to us, and through the Incarnation of the Word the Mind whence all things proceed has been declared, and its Agent and Ordainer, the Word of God Himself. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God. He manifested Himself by means of a body in order that we might perceive the Mind of the unseen Father. He endured shame from men that we might inherit immortality. He Himself was unhurt by this, for He is impassible and incorruptible ; but by His own impassibility He kept and healed the suffering men on whose account He thus endured. In short, such and so many are the Saviour's achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves. One cannot see all the waves with one's eyes, for when one tries to do so those that are following on baffle one's senses. Even so, when one wants to take in all the achievements of Christ in the body, one cannot do so, even by reckoning them up, for the things that transcend one's thought are always more than those one thinks that one has grasped.

As we cannot speak adequately about even a part of His work, therefore, it will be better for us not to speak about it as a whole. So we will mention but one thing more, and then leave the whole for you to marvel at. For, indeed, everything about it- is marvellous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe."

'On the Incarnation' 8.54

My daughter asked me a few months ago if Jesus was dangerous. I laughed at first because I wanted to say "no, no honey. He is kind and loving and wonderful and safe". Yes, He is all those things. But He is wonderfully dangerous, and scandalous and controversial and His grace is inconceivable. But He is real. He came. He died. He rose. He lives. Our journey begins this Advent with the manager but it leads to the Cross. Let's journey together.

To God be the Glory,
Leeanne