As I consider the Advent season, I am reminded and inspired to think that Jesus’ birth on earth transformed everything, whether I (or you) have ‘met’ Him or not. I have always stumbled on the questions: “Have you met Jesus?” or “Do you know Jesus?”. I recall the first time I heard them as a teenager at a Young Life Weekend. Although I had been raised Christian and knew the story of Jesus, I was fairly certain I hadn’t had a specific “meeting.” After all, one would remember such an incident, right?

Fifteen years later, I still wrestle with the concept of “knowing” God. This assumption - that you either “know” God or you don’t - seems to turn the active process of faith into a stagnant, one-time realization.

Of course, the one-time meeting would make things so easy; we’d have a guaranteed spot on the List to Heaven. Perhaps Jesus was speaking to our tendency to seek this quick assurance when he warned, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21) Entering heaven, to me, seems less of a one-time meeting with God, and more of a lifetime endeavor to do God’s will.

I like what the 18th century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg said about how to genuinely love and worship God: “Many suppose that they worship the Lord by faith when they believe the things of the doctrine of the church, and that they worship the Lord by love when they love Him. Yet the Lord is not worshiped by merely believing, and by merely loving, but by living according to His commandments” (Secrets of Heaven 1064:2). More recently, Rob Bell, in his work Love Wins, also offers some insight about how hard it can be to really “know” Jesus. He writes: “In the stories about Jesus a lot of people, including his own family, are uncertain about exactly who Jesus is and what he’s up to—except demons, who know exactly who he is and what he is doing.”

As I reflect on the Christmas story, and celebrate the Lord’s birth on earth, I won’t be focusing on a time that I “met” Jesus, or thinking of his presence on earth as a one-time event. Still, I want to celebrate the miracle of the invisible becoming visible, a new illumination of the path of compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and deep love. Probably the greatest gift I could give to the Divine, and especially to those around me, is to follow that path, to embody those qualities. I want to let my life (not just my words) become a testament to the beauty and transformative power of the Christmas story. That’s the only way I know how to “know” Jesus. And if that’s what they meant by the question all those years ago, then, my answer would be “I’m getting to know him more all the time.”