"Come...just as you are."

"Could love have ever been more perfectly captured? In the cries of newborn lungs tasting our air for the first time was the voice of the one for whom the world had waited. There in the arms of a teenage girl, on the floor of a stable, wrapped in rags...His Majesty."
"I wonder how the shepherds that night must have appeared. I am not sure what they heard in the angels' song over their fields, but I cannot help but think that they were led to believe that in Bethlehem they would find the hope they had longed for all of their lives. Hope. The hope of a better day. The hope of true love...the hope of life."
"Sprinting across fields and running through the city streets they searched for the one about whom they had been told. And I imagine that moment, when, stumbling over each other, they found him...when they saw his face. The eyes of man witnesing the dawn of grace."
"Without a thought for appearances they had run. They were the uneducated weather worn blue-collar souls of their day. Nameless even in the Bible, they were known collectively for what they did rather than who they were. A nameless bunch of ordinary, and perhaps less than ordinary, every day men, running at a dead sprint in the hope that it was true that a king really had been born for them. And winded and out of breath, they found him. What a perfect picture of the age old invitation that is so often forgotten, "Come, just as you are."
"And the words of the old prophet echo through the ages, "surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows." I wonder if Isaiah could see that night as he wrote those words. Could he ever have imagined the course of events that began so humbly in a stable and ended in an empty tomb?"
"You see the deep beauty of Christmas is in the truth that on that night, the sacrifice that would save the world was born. There in the sweetness of that night was the one who would carry the full weight of our sin. ...the one who would erase the shame and pain of our selfish lives. ...the passion of God for the heart of man revealed at last. ...the price of our redemption lying in a manger."
"Sometimes I lose sight of the beauty of that night. The faith is relegated to church politics, appearances, gossip, and power. Lost in all the trappings of religion is the sweet simplicity and wonder of the message of Christmas. It was God doing what we so desperately needed him to do. ...coming to teach us to love...to teach us how to live...and to teach us how to die. The almighty, submiting himself to flesh and bone, to love the unlovely, to feed the poor, to give hope to broken lives...and to give life to broken hearts."
"And the message, as clear today as it was on that night...come, without regard for where you have been or what you have done. For those whose names no one knows, and for those whose sin everyone knows...come, run to find the humble savior. Come, stumbling over yourselves, to see his face. And sit in the silence of the manger, and take it all in. ...and let this echo across your heart...salvation is here. Merry Christmas."

Good Hope -Matthew M. McCord-