Fully human life
It’s hard to believe that Christmas is over. Just yesterday, it seems, we were opening gifts and drinking eggnog and cooing at the baby Jesus. How cute he looks in diapers and all. One of the inevitable practices of my family’s holiday tradition is retelling the embarrassing stories from me and my sister’s childhood. “Remember that time?” my mother will start, and I roll my eyes but eventually join in the laughter at how simultaneously cute, uncoordinated, and ridiculous I apparently was (there are videos to prove at least the last two of those things).
I wish there were more stories about Jesus’s childhood in the Bible. I’ve always wondered: did he cry for his mom or his dad when he was scared of the dark, was he better at spelling or soccer, who was his first crush? I’d love to know because I wonder what experiences helped to make him the adult that he became: a fully human being who lived life with great courage and rigorous honesty and audacious love. A teacher who not only taught lessons but lived them out in ways that made people think, “Hmm. Maybe this is how life really is, or could be.” A true friend who helped people trade in obsession and moralizing for freedom and joy.
So we don’t know what he wore to his middle-school dance, but we do know that when he grew up, he invited us to grow up, too. To begin again or for the very first time the journey of real life, a “way” that holds together deep self-awareness with genuine care for others — and all of it undergirded by the unbelievable love of God and a community of people who are committed to it right alongside you.
It’s a New Year. It’s a new day. Welcome to the journey of becoming fully human, or to another leg of the journey, at least. Who knows what you’ll pick up along the way, and what you’ll throw out. Discovering that is part of the fun.
Peace,
Trey
trey@urbanvillagechurch.org