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Reflection:

Incarnation is the process of becoming seen. 

To be seen is to allow yourself to be known. 

To be known is to risk being loved . . . or not. 

I remember my friend Taylor saying to me one time, “I don’t want God to love me. I just want God to tell me what to do. Because if I let God love me, He will love me the way I am. And if I let God love me the way I am, I will have to see the way I am. And I don’t want to see the way I am. So I’d rather God just tell me what to do.”

Why is being seen so hard? 

It’s hard because when you decide to live into your true self - your strengths and weaknesses, your light and shadow, your superpowers and your kryptonites - you are revealing yourself to the world, and you can now be touched. Loved, rejected, embraced, ignored . . . and all of the other complicated interactions that come with human relationships.

One of the invitations of Advent is the contemplation of God being seen, 

which is to say….incarnation.

You might think God in flesh would be the most all- encompassing, attractive Being there ever was with no risk of rejection, but the answer to that assumption is a big biblical nope! 

What we see in the chronicles about Jesus’ life is that being seen was complicated for Him too. His incarnation was not void of hardship and heartbreak.

But what we see in Jesus is a spirituality that is grounded in the never-ending spring of LOVE that was the source of everything He did. It was the source that enabled Him to forgive the haters. It was the source that empowered Him to lay down His own life for those He loved . . . which is humanity. 

…

* this meditation is an excerpt from the book Honest Advent.