We would love God to make everything happy, surround us with perfect things, and do things FOR us, now and forever. But God shows us something else at Christmas. God speaks a rather different word than “FOR.”. The angel says to Joseph, “Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is WITH us.” And then, in today’s gospel reading, we get the summary statement of what Christmas means: “The Word became flesh and lived WITH us.” It’s a plain old little word, but this is the word that lies at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the Christian faith. The word is “WITH.”
