The LITD Christmas Eve post

This is the first Christmas for this blog. (For any new visitors here, let me quickly brief you: my old blog of five years, Bent Notes, just up and disappeared and no amount of Wordpress support could bring it back.) At Bent Notes, I customarily wrote a Christmas Eve Post.
I don't know that they were anything close to my best stuff as a writer. I generally wound up harping on the remaining doctrinal sticking points in my quest to really understand, and thereby embrace, Christian faith. I do wish I had the entire collection of the BN posts in the "religion and spirituality" category, because there were some nuggets of genuine hard-won insight, and some sincerely grappled-with and precisely articulated points that were still hanging me up.
I think what strikes me most as I compose the first LITD Christmas Eve post is the challenge for someone for whom spiritual inquiry is at the forefront of life's concerns, yet who is untrained in theology, to write credibly about something so big.
I finally get it that Jesus is the only begotten son of the Most High. For years during adolescence and well into adulthood I tidily deemed the Nazarene a "wayshower," in the parlance of the New Thought denominations. Now, after years of approaching the apologetics of C.S. Lewis with the respect and humility that allows for the possibility that he is exactly right, I see that we are talking about a miraculous birth here, not only because of the mother's virginity, but because of who the father was.
It widens one's perspective on the gospels to remember that Jesus, as dvinity incrnate, knew everything. Even when he was kind of playing games with people such as the woman at the well, or various disciples, or even Pharisees, he asked question of others not because he lacked any information, but because he wanted them to see something they hadn't previously seen.
No one else knows everything about you, not your spouse, closest work associate, oldest childhood friend, or dearest sibling. Some of those people do indeed know you very well, and look compassionately on your shortcomings to the degree that they have cultivated a sublime and mature love.
Still, there are recesses of your mind and heart - places where traces of foul, unsavory indulgences of greed, lust, envy and resentment thrive with little or no sunlight - that these people will never know. You know them; you visit them in those stark middle-of-the-night moments after you've run through the next day's to-do list and the week's bills. You and God.
How are you supposed to react in the presence of someone who knows you completely? Before long, you have to ask that someone, out loud or at least mentally, how could you love someone like me?
The only way that someone could indeed love you is to create a way for you in your totality, dark recesses and all, to be okay.
That's what's really going on in the conception, birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's another thing I find myself doing when discussing Christmas the older I get. The whole thing is of a piece. Implicit in the birth are all the other significant aspects of His earthly existence. The cross and the empty tomb can be seen from the manger.
After all, he was God. Right there in three dimensions, tender and mild.