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All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through his prophet: "Look! 
The virgin will conceive a child! 
She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means 'God is with us.'"
Matthew 1:20-23 NLT
God is with us.
With us in the merry part of Christmas, the goodness, with us in the struggles, the grieving too. 
God is with us. 
I had to read this piece from NT Wright a few times, but he puts it like this: 
"This is the really scary thing... not that Jesus might be identified with a remote, lofty, imaginary being, but that God, the real God, the one true God, might actually look like Jesus... a shrewd Palestinian Jewish villager who drank wine with his friends, agonized over the plight of his people, taught in strange stories and pungent aphorisms, and was executed by the occupying forces. To say that Jesus is in some sense God is of course to make a startling statement about Jesus. It is also to make a stupendous claim about God."
God is with us. 
I have no idea what pungent aphorisms are, but the Eternal becoming an embodied person just like us is just as hard to grasp. 
Yesterday I picked up a young child, she had a cry, a smile and a wee laugh, just as Joseph, some random shepherd, his Mum would have done 2000 years ago, and Jesus, God, would have had a cry, a smile, and a wee laugh...
#christmas 
#ponder
#Godentersthestory
#hopeishere

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