By Collin Ross
When I was a child, my mother read me a book about a little baby bird who had lost his mother. He searched far and wide for his mother, approaching an assortment of animals with the question, “Are you my mother?” A hen, a dog, a cow, even a boat and an airplane. But none of those things were the bird’s mother. Finally, he approached an excavator and asked yet again, “Are you my mother?” The excavator gave a dreadful “snort,” before picking up the baby bird and placing it back into his nest, reuniting him with his mother.
It is a silly book, but it speaks to something that is true of all of us. We are all born outside of our Father in heaven. We spend our entire lives searching for our place of belonging and love that tells us who we are and whose we are. And just like that baby bird we approach all kinds of things in this world asking, “Can you be my place of belonging? Can you tell me who I am and whose I am?” But just like with the children’s story, none of those worldly things can be our Father.
But on this day of days, we celebrate the wondrous truth that Christ has come and that He promises to bring us into new life in the family of God. Now we can finally find our home in the Father’s love. We can finally rest in knowing who we are because we know whose we are. All of this is made possible because “Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11).
Christ has come to be the Messiah, the One anointed to save God’s people and bring them home to the Father. And listen to the angel’s announcement: the Savior Christ was born this day for you. The Messiah has come to bring you home to the Father. And the Lord knows we need His help. We’d never be able to find our way back home to God, which is precisely why our God came to us and carried us home to His love.
What do we really want? What kind of love do we really want? We are all longing for the kind of love that we receive when a mother and a father first hold their newborn baby. A baby that has done nothing from the moment of its birth except wail and cry. A baby that has done nothing clever, nothing intelligent, nothing profitable or attractive. They simply exist. And yet, they are welcomed into the waiting arms of their mother and father who say with teary eyes, “You bring us such incredible joy.”
That is exactly the kind of love that we are freely given in Christ Jesus. The Messiah has come to bring us into that love because that love is our eternal home. May we never go searching for our place of belonging anywhere else.
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