Steve West - For unto us

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, December 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Here’s WORLD commentator Steve West on the reason to be glad.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: Sometimes, in the midst of all the run-up to Christmas, it's nigh impossible to catch the real Christmas. I feel like a minnow trying to swim upstream in a torrent of Christmas marketing and gift-giving.

Yet the best Christmas I remember was also the most difficult for my wife and me. Some time after Thanksgiving in 1991 we received a call from a counselor at a crisis pregnancy center in a small Oregon town. She told us that an unwed mother she counseled had chosen us to parent her soon-to-be-born child.

That Advent season became a season of expectancy not just of Christ’s birth but of this immediate birth. While happy, we also pondered what it all meant, questioned how it would happen, and considered the possibility that it would all unwind. Advent was in some ways all awry, fraught with thoughts not of the Incarnate One, but the child to come. It took us out of the Christmas rush and onto another focus entirely: a birth.

Two days before Christmas, we got an urgent call from the counselor. The birth mother was in labor. We booked tickets for our 3,000 mile journey and left tree and gifts and family—only to be informed on arrival that it was false labor. Since it was too expensive to fly home and then back again, we settled into a mom-and-pop motel in a town of no more than 3,000 people, strangers in a strange land.

Fog and mist enveloped us in that unknown town. We bought cheap paper Christmas decorations and stuck them on the walls of our motel room. We decorated a tabletop tree. We felt alone, missing home, family, friends, and church. We waited. We spent our days getting to know a very pregnant teenage girl—a girl carrying our baby. But eventually, a baby boy was born, and we came home on January 7th, just over two weeks later. Advent, Christmas, and even Epiphany had passed.

Maybe that's the only antidote for Christmas—for the false one destined to collapse the day after—to be wrenched out of our comfort zone and set down in a foreign place. When you have been stripped of what passes for Christmas here and set down in a place where your focus is on a child to come, Advent becomes a sober waiting, the birth a celebration. Unto us a child is born, Isaiah says. For us, a child was born.

It’s sometimes difficult to hear what those words are saying in the midst of all that swirls around us. But on at least one Christmas it wasn't like that. If our son’s birth was that momentous, how can I ever again pass by the words "unto us a child is born" and not be awestruck at the reality of the Creator of all poured into a little boy?

Unto us a child is born.

So be indignant about any Christmas that passes for a celebration of less than that. Ruminate on the love of a God who poured Himself out for a world that will celebrate anything but His birth. Rejoice, and be glad.

I’m Steve West.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.