New Life

Every birth touches the lives around it.

Seven years ago, on Christmas, I delivered a baby into the arms of it's mother and father, and family. We all knew the baby would not live. The baby had a condition that would not allow it to survive outside of the womb. For 15 minutes, an entire lifespan, this child was held, and loved, and cherished.

Yesterday I watched a young mother in tears as I discharged her newborn child into the arms of a foster mother. The birth mother had broken too many rules, put herself and her unborn child at risk too many times for her to be allowed to be primarily connected to this life she had carried for the past 9 months.

Today I was called away from family reunions and celebrations to help with the urgent surgical delivery of another child. He did fine - big and beautiful.

God comes to us this way on Christmas - in the midst of our real lives. Our circumstances are different: joyous, sorrowful, hopeful, fearful, but within it all, there is God - in our lives, among us, born into our reality.

There is the new start, the hope for the world, the word made flesh.

Because God invests God's self fully in our lives, we are changed. We have the promise that we are more than our brief time on this world, redemption when all seems broken, and the joy that comes from a creator who delights in our lives and the world around us.

Merry Christmas