God Chose to Become Flesh | A Virtual Pilgrimage for Advent & Christmas: Christmas Octave Day 3

In her final Incarnation reflection, Val invites us to contemplate the startling truth of Christmas: that God did not merely visit humanity, but chose to dwell fully in our flesh, sanctifying ordinary human life from the inside out.

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Transcript

🎶 Come by here, dear God. Come by here. Loving God, come by here. 🎶 

There’s a moment every Christmas. After I’ve laid out the nativity scene, I just stare at it for a long time.

The Word became flesh — not appeared as flesh, or seemed like flesh. Became. Past tense. Permanent. Irreversible.

The eternal God who spoke galaxies into existence, who exists outside of time itself — this God chose to become an embryo. To have a heartbeat that started. To have lungs that took their first breath. To have skin that could be pierced.

I think of the last time I held a newborn baby, when I could feel the weight of that tiny body — so frail, so dependent.

And I think: God did this. God chose this vulnerability.

The hands that flung stars into space became hands small enough to grasp Mary’s finger.

But here’s what intrigues me most: God made God’s dwelling among us. The Greek word is skenoo — to pitch a tent, to tabernacle. God didn’t just visit our neighborhood. God moved in.

God learned our language — not as a tourist learning phrases, but as a child learns to speak, slowly and imperfectly at first.

I think about how we dwell with people we love.

The very day we found black mold in our pregnant daughter’s apartment, we insisted. We said, “You’re moving in with us.” Her husband consented, and the five of them — and our unborn grandson — came to live with us temporarily.

Dwelling meant sharing bathrooms; hearing the laughter and banter of children through the walls at night; stepping on or tripping over toys; listening to someone else’s music.

It meant the aroma of food that was different from what I usually cooked.

Dwelling is intimate. It’s not Instagram moments. It’s real life — boring and beautiful and sometimes frustrating.

This is what God chose. Not a strategic divine appearance.

God chose diapers and teething and scraped knees. God chose to learn carpentry from Joseph, getting splinters until novice hands learned the craft.

God chose to know what it feels like when your stomach growls with hunger; when your feet ache from walking; when you’re so tired you could sleep through a storm on a boat.

The Incarnation means God can never un-know what it feels like to have a mother, to lose a loved one, to be misunderstood by the people who should know you best.

Christmas celebrates the day God stopped being a concept and became a person — a person who knew the feeling of dust in weary eyes, bread on a hungry tongue, and tears on a grieving face.

When I feel most disconnected from God — most earthbound and weighed down by my physical limitations — I remember: God chose my body.

God sanctified my body. God redeemed my body.

My body is not a prison for my soul. It is the dwelling place God chose to inhabit.

The Word became flesh, and because of that, my flesh can become a word — a living letter — written not with ink, but with the Spirit.

The very things that make me feel most human — my need for rest, for food, for connection — these are the very things God validated when God became one of us.

This Christmas, I don’t need to escape my humanity to find God.

God is already here, dwelling in the tent of my body, making a home in the mess and beauty of my ordinary, extraordinary, miraculous life.

🎶 And we beheld — beheld his glory — the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 🎶