It's been a rough day.
Parenting has been difficult, shepherding has been hard, and by the end of the day I am feeling emotionally worn out and spiritually drained.
I know that I am not the only one who has days like this. It's been a day where my boys push the limits of their behaviour and stretch my patience. It's been a day where I spend hours texting a couple of young men walk through struggles and difficulties in life. I know that there have been worse days and there will be more difficult days ahead, but today it's been tough, today I feel like nothing has been easy.
Today is also the last day of the second Advent week in which we celebrated love.
It's hard to think that this week is already over. I don't feel like I am finished reflecting on the love of God.
What has stirred in me today especially in the throws of such a difficult day is the intimate love that God has for us.
Christ Jesus, born in a stable and laid in a feed trough. Comforted by parents who loved him and surrounded by a rag-tag group of filthy shepherds. He was worshipped by a host of angels and a star began its own journey to worship the king of kings and brought along a group of magi from the far east.
It is this same Jesus that we find decades later hanging from a cross, surrounded by his family and a rag-tag group of social rejects including tax collectors and shepherds mourning his death.
He came into this world with a simple agenda, to save a lost world, to save me and bring me into a loving relationship with the Father of all creation. He came as a helpless infant to save an infantile world, he came to encourage me to have a childlike faith.
I put my sons to be to bed tonight, I lay there listening to them pray, thanking God for a day of fun and asking for forgiveness for their sin. I held them tightly, whispering in their ears my love for them and thinking about the very pain that God must have enjoured simply sending his only son into this world with such a simple agenda, to die for sinners like me. And I think of the arms of the Father in heaven stretched out now, right now, holding me and whispering that simple sweet reminder - Christ came for you.
