Ann Voskamp - The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas

Contents

Your Invitation to Unwrap the Gift

Big and glossy and loud and fast thats how this bent-up world turns.

But God, when He comes He shows up in this fetal ball.

He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white.

He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand.

The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant.

The Giver becomes the Gift, this quiet offering.

This heart beating in the chest cavity of a held child, a thrumming heart beating hope, beating change, beating love, beating the singular song youve been waiting for that the whole dizzy planets been spinning round waiting for.

Waiting.

Advent.

It comes from the Latin.

It means coming.

When you open the pages of Scripture to read of His coming, of this first Advent, before you ever read of the birth of Jesus, you always have the genealogy of Jesus.

Its the way the Gift unwraps: you have Christs family tree... before you have a Christmas tree. If you dont come to Christmas through Christs family tree and you come into the Christmas story just at the Christmas tree this is hard, to understand the meaning of His coming.

Because without the genealogy of Christ, the limbs of His past, the branches of His family, the love story of His heart that has been coming for you since before the beginning how does Christmas and its tree stand? Its roots would be sheared. Its meaning would be stunted. The arresting pause of the miracle would be lost.

Because in the time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, it wasnt your line of credit, line of work, or line of accomplishments that explained who you were. It was your family line. It was family that mattered. Family gives you context, and origin gives you understanding, and the family tree of Christ always gives you hope.

The coming of Christ was right through families of messed-up monarchs and battling brothers, through affairs and adultery and more than a feud or two, through skeletons in closets and cheaters at tables. It was in that time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, that men were in genealogies and women were invisible. But for Jesus, women had names and stories and lives that mattered.

The family tree of Christ startlingly notes not one woman but four. Four broken women women who felt like outsiders, like has-beens, like never-beens. Women who were weary of being taken advantage of, of being unnoticed and uncherished and unappreciated; women who didnt fit in, who didnt know how to keep going, what to believe, where to go women who had thought about giving up. And Jesus claims exactly these who are wandering and wondering and wounded and worn out as His. He grafts you into His line and His story and His heart, and He gives you His name, His lineage, His righteousness. He graces you with plain grace.

Is there a greater Gift you could want or need or have?

Christ comes right to your Christmas tree and looks at your family tree and says, I am your God, and I am one of you, and Ill be the Gift, and Ill take you. Take Me?

This, this, is the love story thats been coming for you since the beginning.

It is possible for you to miss it.

To brush past it, to rush through it, to not see how it comes for you up over the edges of everything, quiet and unassuming and miraculous how every page of the Word has been writing it, reaching for you, coming for you. And you could wake on Christmas only to grasp that you never took the whole of the Gift, the wide expanse of grace. So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait.

Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved.

For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out.

For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas.

Sometimes the heart waiting for the Gift... is the art of the Gift.

This waiting, your art mark it.

Mark Advent with a counting, a way of staying awake and not missing.

It could happen like the numbering of time, like the rings on a tree.

Like a leaning over that Jesse Tree of the Old Testament, that Jesse Tree axed down, and counting rings down to the greatest Gift, to life out of the dream cut off.

That Jesse Tree, named after Jesse, who was the father of David David to whom God promised that his line and his sons and his family would reign forever without end.

And when Davids sons and grandsons and great-grandsons turned from God and loved the gifts and the flesh more than the Giver and the Father their kingdoms fell. Their homes fell apart.