At Christmastime we celebrate the incarnation, when God became human in the person of Jesus. I cannot think of the incarnation without remembering the day I met Jesus.
My freshman year at CWU, I became troubled by questions: “Why do I exist?” “What is real?” One night, I stayed up philosophizing with a friend. My distress was reaching critical mass. I spent that night and the next day awake, wrestling with my lack of answers. I didn’t eat. Around dinnertime, I decided to eat, though I wasn’t hungry. About half way to the dining hall I sat down on the steps of a small amphitheater and started to cry.
Moments later, a little girl approached, walking a bike. A thought went through my head: God could speak through her. “That’s pretty unlikely,” I argued back. But I stayed open. She said, “I’ll talk to you if you want me to.” I shrugged, “Sure.” “I’ve seen you here before,” she continued. “About eight days a week.” That was curious since I’d never seen her. I kept listening.
In searching for truth, I became attracted to Buddhism. I was raised Catholic and dismissed it as a family superstition. But as the little girl talked, everything pointed to Christianity being true.
For instance, she explained she was hiding behind a bush before approaching me. The bush concealed her except on one side. Pointing east, she said, “People think they can see me from over there, but they can’t. They can only see me from over there,” and she pointed west. This piqued my interest because I considered Buddhism an eastern religion and Christianity a western religion.
Another comment concerned a bungee cord wrapped around the handlebars of the girl’s bike. The hooks crossed and clasped underneath the handlebars and couldn’t be seen. Making a revolving motion with her fingers, she described the bungee cord: “On the outside, it looks like this. But underneath, it’s actually this,” and she arranged her fingers in a cross. The message was this: The cycling of opposites represented by the yin-yang (a Buddhist symbol) was only an appearance. Reality was the cross of Christ.
She talked awhile longer. After she left, I admitted to myself I had never thought about the gospel. I had ridiculed and argued against Christianity, but hadn’t just thought about it. So I did, in my own terms: God is infinite, and He became finite … gave up infinity, all he is and has … and died … That was all it took. Less than 30 seconds. I was floored — especially by God becoming man — and said: “God, if that’s who you are, I believe in that. I don’t know about church or Christianity or anything, but I believe in you.”
John says, “If what you have heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2:24). I often return to what I learned the night I met Jesus: God loves us more than Himself. That is all we need to know. We may grow into that but we never grow out of it. As the body of Christ, the fullness of our calling is to “grow in every way into Him who is the head—Christ” (Eph. 4:15). Merry Christmas!
Teague McKamey lives in Ellensburg with his wife and two children. He is an Elder at Thorp Community Church and blogs at thevoiceofone.org.
