The child was born to an unwed mother in a shelter built for animals. The man who stayed close to her side that night wasn't the baby's biological father. He said he loved the woman, but was that enough? A blue-collar laborer, his financial future was cloudy at best.
Soon after the infant's birth, the government ordered the child taken from the home-by force if necessary. Tipped off about the raid, the family fled the country as refugees, surviving on the mercy of strangers.
What hope could there be for such a child as this? What good could come from this pitiful beginning? We could have predicted the ending: as a man, he was declared a criminal and sentenced to death.
But to this child, this man, we owe our lives-all that we are or could hope to be.
We know this story well, but maybe not as well as we could. The miracle of Christmas was not simply that God came to us in human form, but that the way he came was so unexpected. The Prince came as a pauper. He changed our world from the bottom up.
The miracle we need again this Christmas is to encounter the Divine in unexpected forms. To pursue something beyond the ordinary. And to believe the unbelievable: That even now, with the Prince's help, we can be better, deeper, different than what we could imagine. -DR
