Author Ian Maclaren tells a true story of a young woman in his book, Beside the Bonnie Briar Brush. This woman was raised in a Christian home in Ireland, but she wanted to find her freedom: freedom from all the rules, freedom from religion, freedom from Puritanism, freedom from God. And so she goes away and finds the kind of life she thinks is free. She gets for herself all she has ever desired. But it is never enough. And what she possesses begins to possess her. Now she doesn’t even know what it means to be free.
Well, one day, like a prodigal daughter, this woman decides to go home. When she gets near the cottage of her birth, she wants to turn around. What is she looking for anyway? She’s left this place behind! And her footsteps falter. She begins to turn her body. But then the dogs in the yard catch scent of her. They haven’t forgotten her even though it has been so long. Then the light comes on at the door, and she knows she’s been caught.
When the door opens, all she can see is her father bathed in the light. And he calls out her name, even though he doesn’t have a reason to expect her. He calls out her name, and suddenly her feet take her running to him. And he taker her in his arms, and he sobs out blessings on her head.
Later, when the woman tells her neighbour what happened, she says, “It’s a pity, Margret, that you don’t know Gaelic! That’s the best of all languages for loving. There are fifty words for ‘darling,’ and my father could be calling me every one of them that night I came home.”
Jesus has fifty-plus words for us – that is what the stable scene is all about, what Christmas is all about. But to hear them, we have to get close and find our rightful place among the shepherds, the wise men, the animals, all the other outcasts Jesus came to save.
From The Word In and Out of Season by William J. Bausch.