The image is a gift. I’m ready to leave for my day’s work, but I’d like to check the weather. So I pull back the curtains of my hotel room and find this incredible juxtaposition of what’s inside my room and what’s across the street. Never one to pass up a visual gift, I stand and marvel.

The complexity of it delights me. The geometric patterns of the building fusing with elements on my wall. The center line of division down the middle of my form. The window that seems to open out of my shirt pocket like a glimpse into my soul. (Not surprisingly, there's a TV in my soul.)

And then I see it: the tiny version of me. Within me.

Can you see it? I have no idea how that mini-me is created in the reflection/projection before me. But it’s amazing.

It’s still me. Just greatly reduced.

This fits with the reading I’ve been doing in Isaiah this Advent season. Recently, these verses jumped out at me:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,”
     declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8,9

Our wonder at the birth of Jesus is directly connected to our vision of the greatness of the Godhead. These verses are a good starting point for that. How does One who is vastly, incalculably more than his audience explain that difference in a way they can understand?

By analogy.

I have a growing throng of grandchildren under the age of five (note: we should have a word for such a group. A giggle of young kids, perhaps?), and it seems that each of them comes up with his or her own highest number imaginable, all of them humorously low.

God finds the largest gap we can imagine: the space between us and the starry expanse above.

That gap has only expanded with time. As we learn about the vastness of space, our sense of the unimaginable complexity of God’s mind has grown with it.

On the flight back, I watch a documentary on Jupiter. In it, I learn how the enormous planet not only helped to create the conditions for the formation of earth, it now protects earth by absorbing and diverting most incoming asteroids. The narrator explained how unique this alignment of planets is in the observable universe.

Our Creator, in his wisdom, orchestrated the placement of planets to make a world perfect for the thriving of his beloved children.

This is the God who became a baby.  I’m letting the initial shock of that sentence walk with me as I approach Christmas.

The Ordainer of solar systems, the unimaginable Mind, the true and only Other poured himself into the form of a helpless infant. Out of his great love for me. For you.

It reduces me to speechless awe.

O love, how deep, how broad, how high,
beyond all thought and fantasy,
that God, the Son of God, should take
our mortal form for mortals' sake!  Thomas á Kempis

Great and exalted God, you stagger us by your commitment to save us, even though it required you to become one of us. Aid us in feeling that gap between your thoughts and our thoughts, for in doing so, you help us to worship.

Reader: what helps you to imagine the chasm between our thoughts and his?

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