“Life Begins as a Love Story”

Wednesday, December 16, 2015 

            Ann Voscamp writes that “life begins as a love story….This Christmas story – it begins in the beginning, this love story that’s been coming for you since the beginning.  It begins with the always coming of Christ.  Christ, who is there in the beginning, the voice calling out of darkness, an echo in cosmic emptiness, speaks it by the commanding word of His mouth: Let there be…Let there be light and land and living beasts….But you?  You alone were formed by a huddle of hearts: Let us making human beings.  The authority of God made all of creation.  But it was the affection of God that made all His [sic] children….God in three persons, uncontainable affection, knelt down and kissed warm life into you with the breath of [Her] love. 

            “No matter what your story before, this is your beginning now: you were formed

by Love…for love” ([10], 11).

            For as many times as I have read the creation stories of humanity and the nativity stories of Jesus, I never thought of the imagery of the “warm breath” of God as God breathed both into humanity and into the infant body of God’s son.  In the same way that God breathed into the first man and the first woman, She also breathed into you and into me…giving us not just life, but also love.  No matter who our earthly parents were, we have heavenly parents who made us out of love, for love.

            God’s warm breath created us that way; God’s warm breath breathed into God’s son as a way to show us that we are – always have been and always will be – made by and for Love.

            “The greatest gift we can give our great God is to let [Her] love make us glad (14).” If our eyes and our hearts have experienced life as other than love, all we need to do is remember the sweet breath of God, breathing into our nostrils and into the nostrils of the world’s most treasured baby. 

            What does it mean to you that the same warm breath that breathed life into the baby Jesus also breathed – and continues to breath – it into you?  The name of that breath is Love.