God With Us... A Five Minute Friday post.

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With only a handful of days left until Christmas, I hope and pray you are all done with all the madness and chaos... but I know chances are good that at least some of you are running around down to the last possible moment!

As Advent winds down, and our waiting is met with the fulfillment cries of a newborn King, this is our final Five Minute Friday link up of the year!

Here we go:

This is a Five Minute Friday post... which simply means I set a timer
and free write for five minutes flat on the one-word prompt: WITH

{GO!}


With Christmas being literally just days away...
of course, my mind and my heart go immediately
to the verse in Matthew 1 where we are told
that Jesus will be born and
His name shall be Immanuel,
God with us.

God WITH us... 
I mean...
Come on!

After all the waiting... 
the lamenting and longing through Advent
(and through those 400+ years of silence!)
God promises that He is about to
break through the darkness and
break through the dawn
and He is coming to cram Himself
into flesh and blood and
He will be known as Emmanuel
--which means, 'God with us'!

And all of Creation heaves a sigh of relief...
Because -even before we knew Him...
we've missed Him!

Some translations say 'God with us',
and some say 'God IS with us'...
but it will come as no surprise that
my (current) favorite translation right now
is The Passion and that verse reads like this:

"Listen! A virgin will be pregnant, she will give birth to a Son, and he will be known as “Emmanuel,” which means in Hebrew, “God became one of us.” ~Matt 1:23 TPT

'God with us' is good... 
Oh so good...
But 'God became one of us'...?
Somehow that just seems
more romantic, right?

And here's the thing:
He did!!!

He DID become one of us!

We know however you choose to say it -
God, in the form of Jesus,
showed up on the scene to be with us...
but He also came to become one of us...
to walk among us and to learn to talk and walk
and live and laugh the way we do.
To struggle and stress... to fight and fail...
He came to wander and wonder...
to long for connection and community!

He longed for that more than we could fathom.

I know this because it also says
in the Word, years later...
that it was 'for the joy set before Him'
that He endured the Cross! (Heb 12:2)

Again, in The Passion, that verse reads like this:

"Because his heart was focused on the joy of knowing that you would be his, he endured the agony of the cross and conquered its humiliation, and now sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God!"

Because His heart was focused on the joy of knowing that we would be with Him... that WE would be with HIM...

And here's the other thing:
We are!

The Bible says in Ephesians 2:6 in the Amplified Bible that:

"...He raised us up together with Him [when we believed], and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, [because we are] in Christ Jesus."

Come on!

He came to us
swaddled in a Cradle
to be God with us...
and He willingly hung
upon the Cross,
becoming one of us...
SO THAT
He could rise again, Victorious,
and seat us with Him
in heavenly places.

We are --right now--
forever and always, 
WITH God
all because He came
as Emmanuel...
God with us!

{STOP!}

How could we not wrap this up with a song... 
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel...

Wishing you all a very Merry--
--a very 'God WITH us' Christmas...
And a very Happy New Year!

Linking up with Kate Motaung and the #fmfparty Community today.  Five Minute Fridays give us the chance to dive right in and share what He puts on our hearts! Click HERE to read what others have to say about "WITH"

The FMF lowdown: The gathering happens on Twitter on Thursday nights & then we write our hearts out & hit publish all over the interwebs on Thursday & Friday (& sometimes on Tuesdays!) It's where we encourage & uplift... where we share prayer requests & praise reports... where we talk about food & friends & we find support & kindred hearts. It's where we are reminded that life is good & God is good & we're not alone... & then we all write for five minutes flat, a flash mob of wordsmiths letting our hearts & our fingers do the talking tapping & we hit publish before we can second-guess it all away. We'd love to have you join us!

I'm also linking up with the lovely writer community linked below:

Crystal Twaddell for #FreshMarketFriday

Mary Geisen for #TellHisStory

Kelly Balarie for #RaRaLinkUp

Lori Schumaker for #MomentsofHope

Holley Gerth for #LetsHaveCoffee

If you haven't yet listened to the latest episode of THE CHANGING OUR MINDS PODCAST there is still time... especially if you are still needing a little help getting into the Christmas spirit! We read through the Gospel account of the Christmas Story in Luke and talked about Jesus... His long-awaited arrival, and how that unfolded, and how the Cradle was all leading to the Cross! Also, if you haven't listened yet, check out Episode #010: All Things Christmas! We'd love for you to join us around the table as we share some of our favorite things about the holidays! We will be recording our next episode after the New Year (where chances are good we'll talk about fresh starts and do-overs and new goals and maybe even that One Word we're focusing on in 2019!

Lastly, my hope is to come to you around the first of the year with my annual New Years Day post. After that, however, things may get a little quiet around here again as I welcome in the New Year with a couple of surgeries and a bit of space and time to heal!