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Column: Bethlehem tells the story of Christmas, but of us as well

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Have you ever stopped to ponder the raison d’être for your life?

Of course you have.

Christmas affords us an excellent opportunity to reflect on seeming imponderables. Our culture may be preoccupied with malls, holiday parties, Christmas decorations and gifts, but it’s healthy for us to — in this season of miracles — consider the first-century miracle at Bethlehem.

We pose existential questions like: Who am I? What is my purpose? Where am I headed? What happens after I die?

And we turn to Bethlehem.

Humans have asked those questions for millennia. We commence asking them almost before we can speak, and continue until our last ragged breath. We messy creatures are all about “meaning.”

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Christmas provides answers if we’ll pause long enough to listen. Once we get beyond today’s glut of distractions, Christmas invites us to weigh eternal truths.

A kingdom not of this world has arrived. The maker of the universe has come to dwell inside his creation. It is as if I’d stepped inside the physical boundaries of this column to speak to every jot and tittle.

Christmas is a love letter from God to a broken race. Turns out, it’s the proverbial gift that keeps on giving … well into eternity.

If I’m an honest truth-seeker, I rely largely upon wisdom gleaned from sources more intelligent than myself. God’s thoughts are not my thoughts.

So I embark upon a quest, but it cannot be for “my truth.” That’s too convenient. If it’s to mean anything, I must seek universal and eternal truth. My ultimate salvation depends upon the choices I make.

This world gives me a wink and a nod and suggests I make it up as I go along. I’m told to cobble together a truth that works for me.

Not a chance. I’m not that smart.

My finite mind contains a microbe’s-worth of objective truth, plus a passel of falsehoods invented by — guess who? — me. I dare not rely upon mental gymnastics.

In my 70-plus years, I’ve anchored my life on the supposition that there’s but a single truth. God’s.

Pontius Pilate asked a question for the ages: “What is truth?” What Pilate failed to recognize was that the embodiment of what he sought stood before him in the man, Jesus Christ. He stands before us today.

Our redemption is reflected metaphorically in the conifers and candlelight of the season. The Light of the World has come to redeem us. He has, in fact, purchased for us eternal life.

The story of the babe in the manger has been sanitized by our generation. What actually took place there is gritty and all too common.

“… The infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud,” writes Eric Metaxas in his latest best-seller, “Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.”

“He came to us through screaming pain, the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are.”

The story of our rescue goes 33 years beyond the manger, culminating on a windswept hill and a Roman cross.

The child becomes a man; establishes a bridge between God and his creation; and is executed for this selfless act. On Good Friday he is stripped, beaten and flayed to within an inch of his life, then cruelly revived and crucified.

Sunday is a different story. The world comes face to face with an empty tomb. The unthinkable has happened.

Our culture calls us to retreat into our inner selves to discover wholeness. But what bleeds from my every pore is not truth. It’s anti-truth.

In the Christmas story, the unblemished Christ comes to us, dies for us, and is resurrected ... with us. Greater love hath no man.

Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Truth and sublimity have their fullest expression in the manger.

And Bethlehem isn’t just a story. It’s the story.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.

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