It's a Christmas Miracle.

We all hope for miracles - some big, some small. Some so seemingly insignificant to us that we don't bother mentioning.  Some impossible, far beyond our reach (we don't always mention those ones publicly either). We hope for healing, and financial breakthroughs, material success, houses, cars, good academic records, happy relationships, signs and wonders, mates, dates and babies.

This time of year we celebrate a different kind of miracle though. The reality that God chose to come and dwell/tabernacle with His people. He chose to step down from His heavenly throne and take on skin and bone and human limitations. He made Himself completely vulnerable to us. To be nurtured and to be loved by His creation, or to be hated, scorned and rejected. He got both. 

The greatest miracle is this; the offering of relationship.

God chose relationship with us. We had already spent some four thousand years hurting Him, and yet "while we were still sinners" He chose to give Himself to us again and again. Even if we do not choose Him now. He chooses us still.

He is not Santa. He is not some distant deity appearing sporadically to dispense rewards to those who have proven themselves to be 'nice' and not 'naughty' (Larry Crabb refers to that mindset as Christian Buddhism - if I do good things for God, God will bless me with the good things that I want - doesn't account for bad things happening to good Christians). He is the God who desires relationship above all else. That is essentially what He came to earth for, what He died for.

At the end of the year we get to reflect back on the year that was. We can celebrate all the wonderful things that happened; the blessings and the breakthroughs. We can rejoice. And yet simultaneously...

Even if we didn't receive the miracles we had hoped for this year. Even if we still carry disappointment about the things that didn't happen this year, or the things that went wrong, We still have Him. We still get to partake of the greatest miracle of all.

We get to choose Him in return.