Welcome to Our World

"Welcome to Our World" by Chris Rice

Tears are falling, hearts are breaking
How we need to hear from God
You've been promised, we've been waiting

Welcome Holy Child
Welcome Holy Child

Hope that you don't mind our manger
How I wish we would have known
But long-awaited Holy Stranger
Make Yourself at home
Please make Yourself at home

Bring Your peace into our violence
Bid our hungry souls be filled
Word now breaking Heaven's silence

Welcome to our world
Welcome to our world

Fragile fingers sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
Unto us is born
Unto us is born

So wrap our injured flesh around You
Breathe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world


Every time I hear this song I get a little choked up.  I think it says so much about Christmas.  


At Christmas, I think about how people just didn't get it when Jesus came to earth.  The Savior of the world was expected to be a mighty king--someone strong who would overthrow the Romans and establish a new rule.  Everything was in turmoil, and the Jewish people had been waiting for years.  There had been years and years of silence--no revelation from God.  A period of anticipation.  It made sense to expect a King--someone who could turn the tide for an oppressed and hurting people.  People were hungry for that Savior.  There was a longing in their souls for more.  They thought they knew what He would look like and what He would do.


But the "Word now breaking heaven's silence" was a baby.  A tiny baby who didn't even have a home, but had to be laid in a manger, a feeding trough for dirty animals.  He was visited by shepherds--the lowest of the low--and a few years later by Magi from the East.  Even the heavens couldn't help but cry out his birth with a magnificent star that led the Magi to Him.  


But He didn't come the way he was expected to at all.  He came as a tiny baby with "fragile fingers sent to heal us."  The fullness of God wrapped in "our injured flesh." Those itty bitty hands that Mary kissed countless times would grow to become a carpenter's hands.  And that carpenter would then touch lepers and cleanse them.  He would place his hands on the dead and raise them to life.  And He would stretch out those hands and allow them to be nailed to a cross.   


I think the line that probably most gets me is "Tiny heart whose blood will save us."  I'm sure that Jesus got bumps and bruises growing up.  I know the body produces different red and white blood cells over the course of a lifetime.  But that tiny heart that was born pumping the blood of a Savior.  And that blood would atone for sins once for all.  That blood that would mean His death would provide our relationship with Him.  Because that baby would grow up to be a man.  And that man would give His life in a sacrificial death to save us from our sin and bring us to God. 

And that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about.  :)