A story from radio host Paul Harvey’s Christmas Eve broadcast:

One raw winter night, a man heard an irregular thumping against the kitchen storm door. He went to a window and he watched as tiny, shivering sparrows, attracted to the evident warmth inside, were flying into the window, thinking that they could come inside, and they would hit the window and they would fall down. The farmer was a very compassionate person and he was touched so he decided to help these helpless birds and he bundled up and trudged through the fresh snow to open the barn for the struggling birds. He turned on the lights, tossed some hay in a comer, sprinkled a trail of saltine crackers to where the birds were. But the sparrows, who had scattered in all directions when he emerged from the house, hid in the darkness and didn’t come to the barn. So he tried some other things. He circled behind where the birds were and tried to drive them into the barn. He tossed cracker crumbs in the air toward them, retreating to his house to see if they’d flutter into the barn on their own. Nothing worked. Because he was a huge alien creature and he had terrified these birds, the birds could not understand that he actually wanted to help them. So he withdrew to his house and watched the doomed sparrows through a window.

And as he stared, a thought hit him like lightning from a clear blue sky: If only I could become a bird, if only I could be one of them just for a moment, then I wouldn’t frighten them so much. I could show them the way to warmth and safety. At the same moment, another thought dawned on him. He had just grasped the entire principle of the Incarnation. A man becoming a bird is nothing compared to God becoming a man. The concept of a sovereign being as big as the universe he created, confining himself to a human body was and is too much for us to understand.But it’s what really happened. God came down to be one of us. The Godhead was poured into human flesh so that He could lead us out of the darkness into the light. Christmas is not just about a little baby in a manger with some shepherds and wise men. Christmas is about God loving me so much that He came down here to be just like me, so that one day I could be just like Him. That is the meaning of Christmas.