God Did Not Show Up To Strike Fear. God showed up to be loved like a baby.

​I grew up afraid of making mistakes. Largely because of how my mistakes were dealt with in my home and school and church.

I think the most consequential impact of all that was I grew up afraid of God. Since I was quite prone to making mistakes, I guess I naturally assumed God was hunting me down, wanting to strike me, wanting to make me atone for my mistakes in some way that looked and felt similar to the ways others had made me atone for them.

I don't fear God that way anymore.

Christmas has a lot to do with that.

I have a Christmas song that means a lot to me. I thought about that song standing on a hillside in falling snow yesterday. Some of the lyrics to that song go like this:

Could've come like a mighty storm
With all the strength of a hurricane
You could've come like a forest fire
With the power of Heaven in Your flame

But you came like a winter snow
Quiet and soft and slow
Falling from the sky in the night
To the earth below

Isn't that beautiful?

I've spent a lot of time the last decade pealing back the layers of my life. And a lot of that has been untangling some of the perceptions I have had about God's authority in my life that are soiled by the perceptions I have had of other examples of authority over my life.

But God IS an authority in my life. And God DID show up to deal with the mistakes I have made and continue to make in my life. But do you know how God showed up to deal with them? He showed up as a baby in a manger.

God did not show up with a belt or a board or a long wooden rod, God showed up naked and helpless and totally dependent on the nurturing and protection of his young mother. Mary.

God did not show up inciting the slightest hint of fear; God showed up to rule the world as humble as one can show up for anything at all.

And as God became Jesus and then became a ministry of dealing with and the healing of all sorts of physical and behavioral maladies, he continued to do so with gentleness and compassion.

Right up until that moment the baby in a manger was hoisted up on a cross, with the power to strike dead his killers, but in his strongest message ever, maybe, refusing to do so, all in the name of lovingly absorbing the atonement for our mistakes in replacement of anyone thinking they would need to strike us to achieve such.

I know for many of us, our march to Bethlehem is heavily influenced by people and circumstances of this world. And maybe those people and circumstances have not left us trusting in or feeling the gentleness of that baby in a manger.

But on the way there, reflect, and know God could have shown up like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, but God did not. God showed up like a winter snow, quiet and soft and slow, falling from the sky in the night to the earth below.

For me, that is one of the most beautiful plotlines of this Christmas story. Knowing how God CHOSE to arrive has totally shifted the way I see and feel this Jesus who stayed after the cross to live in me.

Humble and gentle.

A Jesus I do not fear, but accept like a quiet and soft and slow falling snow.

God could have showed up looking to strike fear.

But God did not.

God showed up as Christmas.