The good thing about having two pastors on staff is that I only preach every other Sunday...and every other Christmas Eve. It's Glenn's turn this year.
Still, I find myself pondering (like Mary, but not really) all these things in my heart.
The other day, while driving about on Christmas shopping and grocery errands, I caught a segment of a public radio story about rebuilding schools in New Orleans. The reporter reminded us that many schools still are not rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, more than 4 years ago. The story featured (and celebrated) one newly built.
I was thinking how I hear things differently once I've been to a place. I spent a week in New Orleans with high school youth this summer. We did Bible study and church and all that, but we also took a tour of the Lower 9th Ward and other ravaged places. We spent more than four hours pulling weeds and re-setting fallen gravestones in the mostly African-American Holt cemetary.
So, I've been there. And now I hear about that place differently.
Have you noticed this? It's not like, as people of faith, we don't care when we hear news stories, good or bad, about places like Honduras, Gaza, Bagram or Detroit. But if you've been there, everything is different. There's a level of knowing not attained by reading or hearing stories alone.
There's something, then, to Christ coming to Earth in human flesh. It's not so much that God needed to know what it was like to be human. Since God's knowing surpassed our own, I think God could have understood the human experience just fine from a distance. But perhaps God knew that we needed to know that God knows. Because he's been here.
And now, we can hear differently.
