A Season For Babies

I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.

—Luke 2:10–11

Christmas is, after all, a season for babies. After Henry was born, it made sense to me in a new way that God chose to wrap his divinity in baby bones and baby skin. I always thought maybe it was to demonstrate vulnerability, or to identify fully with each phase of humanity, but now I think it was something else. I think it was because babies make us believe in the possibility and power of the future. We’ve had regular babies, non-Messiah babies, and when I looked at their sleeping faces, all the world seemed new and possible.

Babies make you believe in God because there’s something just beyond understanding about their freshness and fragility. When they take their first breaths, and when they land, floppy and slippery, on your chest under the bright overhead light in an otherwise dim delivery room, when you watch their tiny sleeping selves, when you hear their thin wild animal cries, you know, you just know in your guts that God is real, and that babies have been with him more recently, have come more directly from him than our worn-out old selves have.