Growing up and the incarnation

I love my daughter's age right now. Nine. Eight was really good, too. Old enough to start becoming a person with whom I can have "real" conversations and start exploring some cool things in the city. Young enough before the tween and teen years which I can be fraught with issues, but I also sense those issues can be blown out of proportion.

In my sermon last Sunday, I shared about my wife's and my struggle to conceive Caroline and the many, many months and years of failed attempts and doubts. Because of the sermon, I spent a lot of time thinking about her birth day and the awe I felt at holding her in my arms. The connection to my sermon was that I was preaching about the incarnation and that Jesus' birth isn't some fairy tale, but was (and is) "really real." For a long time, the thought of us giving birth seemed like a fairy tale, too, until the day I actually saw and touched her and her eyelashes, fingernails, and slightly crooked ear lobe.

It's been an interesting balance reflecting on the joy of those memories and realizing that she's slowly but surely getting closer to being 10 and becoming friends that we wouldn't necessarily choose for her and desiring things (like an iTouch) that she's not ready for. She's a very centered girl who doesn't seem to get too high or too low by what goes on around her and I think that's a wonderful quality. But harder decisions are in the offing for us. Letting her be friends with girls whose personalities grate on us a bit. Saying no to an iTouch (though that wasn't a hard decision but it brings back memories of being envious of having friends who had things that I coveted).

Growing up and making these decisions is part of incarnation, I suppose. If we claim that this season is one when we praise God for becoming flesh, we also must realize that becoming flesh means growing pains. Thanks be to God for that.