Many of us think of a God who is someone like Martha Stewart— someone who wouldn’t dare enter our condemned, messy house. God could and would never use us because we’re just too messy. We’re a mess. And we think that God could never use us until we clean up our messy lives.
What we learn from Christmas is that God does His best work in the middle of a mess. Born in a urine soaked, smelly barn and wrapped up in rags in a feeding trough for animals. Nobody went through the barn and scoured it with Softscrub ahead of time. Yet the King of the universe—the Alpha and the Omega—enters into human history in a little bundle, wrapped in obscurity and poverty and humility, because that is God’s signature.