I recently overheard a conversation between two young adults. They were explaining how they don't want children because they don't want to bring them into the brutality and brokenness of this world. It's a fair consideration. I remember wrestling with these same thoughts.
During these heavy, pregnant days of Advent- these days of waiting and anticipation- I've been contemplating what sort of world the Christ child entered.
It wasn't a calm, idyllic world.
It was a world where the power-hungry prevailed. It was a world where the poor and imprisoned longed for liberation. It was a world stained in the blood of the innocents. It was a world full of tyrants and terror- a world groaning for deliverance. It was a frenzied, fearful, desperate world.
It was this sort of world, God was born.
It wasn't a safe world. It was dangerous and full of pain.
But even then, especially then, God was born.
Still today, God is born.
God is born not only into places of joy and peace, but into places of violence and despair.
God comes into our earthquakes and elections; our broken bodies and broken families; our loneliness and our longing.
Smack dab in the middle and mess of it all, God is born again.
Isn't that good news?