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contributed by Aimee

I shared this in church on Sunday and thought it would be fitting on the blog as well:

Yesterday I was listening to Carolyn Arends' Christmas album. It touches me deeply every year. Tears being pulled from the deep places of me before the songs even start - just in anticipations of the words...

The opening lines of the song "Come and See" stopped me i my tracks:

Have you heard, have you heard

All the rumors are true

Spread the word, spread the word

This is such good news

The dream is not a dream anymore

Nothing is the same as before

I think the tears are tears of joy from imagining what the arrival of Jesus would have meant for people like Simeon and the shepherds. Years of waiting and longing for the Shalom - wholeness, completeness, peace - that the Messiah would bring. And now, according to the angels filling the sky, the "dream is not a dream anymore". The saviour has arrived. Nothing is the same as before.

But even more so the tears are from hope. That this would become true for me too. That because of Jesus' arrival my life would not be the same anymore. That the rumors I have heard of an intimate relationship with him - knowing his love would be true. For me.

When Lance asked me to parallel the pregnancy experience with discipleship, or the idea of carrying Christ in us with pregnancy... I had nothing to say. I couldn't relate the two. And now I'm wondering if it is because pregnancy and birth are so intimate...

A baby growing inside me, nothing could be closer than that. Always together, a little life growing in me. Causing my body to change shape. Kicking me.

But I don't know Jesus in that way. I am not always conscious of him, him being with me, in me. Not like during pregnancy, feeling the baby's every move inside me. I am baffled by Jesus' desire to dwell within me. It is strange for me to think of him being that close. I alternately long for and run from this intimacy. And I think I'm afraid too of what that kind of closeness might mean. Or lead too. How will my life be shaken up if I open up and receive? But part of me, the truest part, knows that I want my life shaken up. I haven't done a good job ordering it anyways. I long to answer with the hope and trust of Mary. To receive him and to be changed.

There were times, in the early days of pregnancy, when it was possible to forget for a moment that I was pregnant. If my stomach wasn't empty and no one was chopping an onion or frying ground beef within a one block radius, I might for a few minutes forget about the life that was beginning to take shape within me. And I am hoping that is happening with Jesus inside of me. that even when I try to hide from him, or pay no attention to his presence, he is still there. That his life -- like the lives of each of my children began so small - is being formed in me. And I want to believe that as time goes by, his presence in me will become less and less inconspicuous. That it will literally change my shape and alter me.