Dec 17th – Welcoming Possibilities

December 16th through the 24th is Las Posadas. It is a stylized re-enactment of the traditional Christmas story, in which children, playing the roles of Mary and Joseph, go door to door seeking shelter and being turned away.

In the gospel story, a teenage Mary gives birth to the baby Jesus in an animal stable because there was no room for the young couple in the inn.

The baby Jesus represents hope, new beginnings, transformation, redemption, potential… many different things to many people. Whatever you believe about the adult Jesus, at his birth, he was a baby. As far as we can tell from the stories we have, he was not healing the sick, or raising the dead or multiplying loaves and fishes as a baby. He needed the same nurturing and care every baby needs. Was Jesus some perfect baby who never cried, never spit up in his mother’s hair, never filled a diaper with toxic waste? Perhaps, but I doubt it. I suspect Jesus was, like every baby, beautiful and messy.

That, I think, is how miracles sometimes come to us – beautiful and messy, maybe inconvenient, maybe even painful in their delivery. Often miracles arrive small, full of potential, but not in the fully-developed form they can become if we nurture them. Sometimes our miracles require us to lose a little sleep, to stretch out of our comfort zone. Sometimes miracles require that we give up our old stories about who we are and what we “can’t” do. Always, our baby miracles, just like miracle babies, require our Love.

Jesus started small. We all started small. Whoever we have become, whoever we are yet to become, it takes time, attention and nurturing to grow.

There is a wonderful proverb I learned in my early twenties: Despise not the days of small beginnings.

What that means to me is that much of what we love or desire, or are here to bring forth, starts small.
Trees? seeds
Homes? building materials
Businesses? Books? Movies? Songs? Life Altering Innovations? They all started with the seed of an idea.

+ Today, you’re invited to think about this:
What as-yet-unborn idea is knocking at your door, seeking welcome?
What miracle is in its infancy in your life, requiring your Love and attention and nurturing?

Sometimes miracles do arrive fully grown, but often the miracle people pray for gets turned away at the door because it comes in the form of potential, possibility and opportunity, and not the form they expected.

Be on the lookout for baby miracles today.

Here’s a Christmas song I like that many people have never heard. I’m not a big fan of twang, but I like the lyrics of this song, “Nothing But a Child” by Steve Earle. Referring to the wise men: “…They scarce believed their eyes, they’d come so many miles, and this miracle they prized, was nothing but a child…”

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