12/25/2023
✨FLESH✨Jesus’ birth was no Insta-perfect manger scene with glowing orbs.😇 The most iconic birth in history took place in stinky, un-sanitized manger among farm animals. (Have you ever smelled the stench of a barn filled with livestock? Imagine birthing there!🤢)
What a birth story! The King of the Universe 👑 came to Earth and put on FLESH to live among us.
“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” -John 1:14
I wonder, did Mary experience pain? Did she get scared and ask how long it would take? I don’t know, but, like most unmedicated births, it was probably messy, bloody, vulnerable and intense.🩸
Our modern society doesn’t like dirty and unfiltered. In fact, we CENSOR birth and death. It’s too uncomfortable for our virgin eyes, perhaps.🙈
We like to clean up birth, numb the intense feelings with drugs, cover up baby and mom (esp in postpartum), and make it pretty, shiny and clean.🧼
We censor manger scenes & we censor modern motherhood.🚫
But birth is anything but clean and dignified!
✨Birth is the breaking of waters,
✨The gushing of fluids,
✨Moans too deep for words,
✨Expulsion of a placenta,
✨Blood running down the leg,
✨Skin-to-bloody-vernix-coated-skin.
🐂Among stalls intended for animals, the King of kings was born to a 16 year old girl. His flesh felt cold air, his belly felt hunger and his body felt pain. He was comforted by the gentle touch of his mother and fed by the nourishment of her breastmilk.
In life and death, He demonstrated what pure love looks like: vulnerable and unashamed.❤️
Jesus left this world the same way he came into it, naked and exposed.
Flesh makes us human. It is not a curse. It is the greatest privilege of our existence and it’s one the angels look down upon with envy.
🎄This Christmas, may you experience Jesus’ outrageous love.
🙏May you embrace motherhood, like Mary did, it all its undignified, sacrificial, messy glory.
“We love because He first loved us.” -John 4:19
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Words by
The Creation of Man (2017) fine-art photograph by