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God is with Us
My oldest son’s first Christmas was the year of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Parenthood awakened emotions in me that I had never felt before, and as I heard about the thousands of orphaned children, I held Athan, then just a couple months old, a little tighter, and felt a grief I had never known before followed by the age-old question, “God, why? What kind of God are You that You could allow this to happen?”
Five years later, I know that I will never be able to articulate a neat, packaged answer to why there is suffering in the world. However, God has comforted me immeasurably in what was once a cute Sunday school story, sweetly portrayed on a flannel-board nativity scene. In the Christmas story, I find a God who is humble and approachable, and quite backward in comparison to my logic.
Jesus is God’s answer to injustice, suffering, and corruption. Israel was brimming with such darkness during His time here on earth. There was wide-spread corruption amongst the highest Jewish religious leaders, social injustice was a way of life, women were second-class citizens, Samaritans were considered racially tainted and cast out of society, and crucifixion was common-place and publicly displayed. God’s answer to all of this darkness was to, at long last, send the Messiah. Jewish religious leaders dedicated their lives to studying scriptures foretelling the Savior’s coming. Yet when He finally came, fulfilling every one of these prophecies in their full view, He was not recognized. This Messiah they had been expecting for centuries did not come as a powerful, majestic King, but as a newborn child who could not even lift His own head.
Jesus could have been born, lived, and died for our sins in any number of ways. Why was He sent in a way that brought such shame to His family? How crushed must Mary have felt burying her son who died the public death of a criminal after having believed since the moment of His conception that He was destined for greatness beyond all that history had ever known? The nation she thought He would restore to its rightful place in this world called for His execution. Why did God choose such a seemingly backward way for the Messiah to save us?
These questions remind me of my young son who has a difficult time falling asleep. He is afraid of the dark. I have tried reasoning with him, praying with him, even bringing in a second nightlight. Finally, one night I simply told him that when I was a little girl, I used to be scared of the dark too. To my surprise, he smiled, and soon drifted off to sleep; comforted by the thought that Mommy once felt the same way he did, and yet lived to tell the story!
Similarly, there’s something comforting in knowing that Jesus went through all of the joys and pains of this human experience. He could have died for our sins after living a privileged and carefree life, but He chose not otherwise. From the moment of His humble birth to the struggle of His dying breath, Jesus chose to enter into this broken world, and play by its rules for a time. But He would never be defeated by them.
The Bible says that Jesus “overcame the world” in all of its evil and corruption. He didn’t do it by battling and defeating it as expected. He did it by embracing it, experiencing it, taking upon Himself the worst this world has to offer, and then forgiving it, paying the full price for its redemption with His own blood.
The prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would be called “Emmanuel,” meaning, “God is with us.” He is not a distant God, only accessible to the religious elite, but a personal Savior who can honestly say to the weary, “I’ve been there.” And He is ready to walk with us again and again through whatever life brings. Through both triumph and tragedy, God is with us. Through both miraculous healing and grievous pain, God is with us.
I tuck my kids in at night with a kiss and a prayer, and feel at peace, because our God is not coming, He has come. He is not near to us, He is with us. 
“Yet in Thy dark street shineth, the everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years, are met in Thee tonight.”