December 23, 2025
There's a version of Christmas that asks a lot of you. The right gifts. The right mood. The right amount of togetherness with people who are sometimes very hard to be together with. And underneath all of it, if you're being honest, this low-grade awareness that you are not quite enough — not patient enough, not present enough, not grateful enough for a life that, on paper, looks like it should feel better than this.
Most of us have been quietly carrying that for a while. The holiday just turns up the volume.
Here's what I want to offer, not as a pick-me-up or a piece of advice, but as something worth sitting with: the very center of the Christmas story is a God who looked at all of that — the exhaustion, the falling short, the resistance, the mess — and came anyway. Not when you got it together. Now. As you are.
That's not a tagline. It's the whole thing.
Two thousand years ago, a small group of shepherds was doing exactly what they did every other night — watching sheep on a hillside outside Bethlehem. Bethlehem was, by any measure, unremarkable. A farming town. The kind of place people passed through on the way to somewhere else.
And the shepherds themselves? In that culture, they were the people polite society stepped around. Considered untrustworthy. Socially invisible. Not the guest list you'd put together if you were announcing the arrival of the most significant person in human history.
Which is exactly why God chose them.
The angel who appeared to those shepherds — blazing, terrifying, the kind of presence that makes grown men hit the ground — didn't announce a military coup or a political revolution. He said: "I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people." Not for the worthy. Not for the ones who had earned it. For all the people.
And then he told them where to find this promised king: wrapped in cloth, lying in a feeding trough.
There's something disorienting about that detail if you let it land. The most powerful being in existence — the one those warrior-angels were announcing — arrived as a newborn who couldn't lift his own head. Justin Ulrich, Terraforma's lead pastor, put it plainly in our Christmas service: "How does an omnipotent God become a helpless baby?"
It's not a question with a clean answer. But the fact that it happened at all says something about what kind of love we're dealing with.
If you are still working out what you believe, our values and beliefs page is a honest place to start. Learn here what Terraforma Church belives.
One of the earliest songs written about Jesus appears in a letter the Apostle Paul wrote to a church in the city of Philippi. Paul quotes the song rather than writes it, which suggests it was already being passed around — sung by people who were trying to put words to something that kept stopping them cold.
The song describes Jesus "emptying himself" — in Greek, the word is kenosis. Pouring out. Open hand. And it contrasts this with another word: harpagmos — clutching, grasping, seizing. The song says that Jesus, being fully God, didn't treat that as something to hold onto. He let it go.
That's not a theological footnote. It's the whole architecture of Christmas.
Think about what God could have done. A God of infinite power arriving to reclaim the allegiance of his creation could have come with force. With overwhelming presence. With no option to refuse. And the thing is — that would have worked. Obedience can be demanded. Fear can be produced. Control can be seized.
But love cannot.
You can't demand love. You can legislate behavior, you can compel compliance, you can install fear. But love — the kind that's chosen freely, that costs the person giving it — that only exists if there's a real option to say no.
So God came helpless. Not because he had no other option, but because helplessness was the only form love could take that left room for a response. He came in a way we couldn't be forced to receive. He came as someone we'd have to choose.
"What if God loves you like that?" Harris asked the congregation, telling a story about a friend whose mother filmed him acting up on stage at a school Christmas show — pulling girls' hair, not knowing the words, making a scene. And when you turned up the volume on the video, you could hear her whispering behind the camera: "That's my boy." Not ashamed. Not angry. Just ridiculously, stubbornly proud.
That image is closer to what the Christmas story is actually pointing at than most of what ends up on greeting cards.
The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, writes something that's easy to read quickly and miss entirely: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, NIV). Not after we improved. Not once we demonstrated sufficient remorse. While we were still in it.
And John — who knew Jesus as closely as anyone did — puts it this way in what is probably the most recognized sentence in the entire Bible: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16, NIV). Not the world once it shaped up. The world as it was. As it is.
There's a character in the Hebrew scriptures named Jacob who spent most of his life as a schemer. A striver. Someone who clawed for every advantage, manipulated the people around him, and generally tried to control every outcome by his own effort. And the remarkable thing about Jacob's story is that God pursues him the whole time.
There's a scene where Jacob, in some kind of supernatural encounter, finds himself wrestling — actually wrestling — with God through the night. And Jacob keeps saying he won't let go until he receives a blessing. And the image Pastor Harris painted of that moment stuck: What do you think I've been trying to do your whole life? I'm not in this to hurt you. Everything is for you.
That's the texture of the Christmas story underneath the lights and carols. A God who has been trying to reach you. Who came in humility because pride keeps us from responding to power. Who came as an infant because it was the only way to get close without overwhelming. Who would have done it, the pastor said, even knowing you might never respond. That's the extent of it.
If some part of you wants that to be true but isn't quite sure you believe it — that's a completely honest place to be. You don't have to have resolved it to sit with it.
1. Earned vs. Given
The world's version: Love is earned through performance.
The Christmas version: Love is given before you qualify.
2. Withheld vs. Extended
The world's version: Love is withheld until you improve.
The Christmas version: Love is extended at your worst.
3. Contingent vs. Rooted
The world's version: Love is contingent on your behavior — it shifts when you do.
The Christmas version: Love is rooted in God's character — it holds even when you don't.
4. Compliance vs. Invitation
The world's version: Love demands compliance.
The Christmas version: Love invites response.
5. Fear vs. Freedom
The world's version: Love produces fear as its primary motivator.
The Christmas version: Love produces freedom as its natural result.
The invitation at the center of Christmas isn't to become a better person so God will notice you. It's almost the opposite. It's to stop striving long enough to receive something you can't produce on your own.
Pastor Harris called it the thing Jesus named "life abundant" — not a reward for the righteous, but what becomes available when you stop white-knuckling everything and let yourself be loved.
That's hard. It might be the hardest thing. Especially for people who have built a life on competence and control — who moved to a place like Ashburn for the schools and the opportunity and the life they worked to build, and who have quietly discovered that working hard doesn't fix the part of you that still feels like it's not enough.
Receiving isn't passive. It's actually a kind of courage.
1. Name what you're actually carrying. Before anything changes, most of us need to get honest about the weight we're dragging into Christmas. Not to fix it — just to stop pretending it isn't there. Write it down if that helps. Say it out loud to someone safe.
2. Let the shepherds story be personal. They were nobodies. They were the last people on the list. God sent the announcement to them first. Whatever version of "not enough" you carry, that story is specifically for you.
3. Read John 3:16 slowly. Not as a theological proposition — as a sentence spoken directly to you. God loved the world — which includes you on your worst day. Let that sit longer than feels comfortable.
4. Try releasing one thing you're white-knuckling. Not everything. Just one. One outcome you've been trying to control that isn't yours to control. See what it feels like to hold it with an open hand for a few days.
If you're in Ashburn, Sterling, Leesburg, or anywhere along the Loudoun County corridor — and something in this felt like it was written for you — you don't have to figure all of this out alone. Terraforma Church exists for people who are still working through it. No credo checklist at the door. No expectation that you've resolved your doubts or cleaned up your life first. Just a community of ordinary people trying to live with a little more honesty, a little less striving, and a little more grace.
You do not have to figure this out alone — our small groups exist for exactly this kind of conversation — find out more here.
Q: Why did God come as a helpless baby instead of a powerful king?
A: According to the Christmas story, God came as a vulnerable infant because love cannot be forced — only freely chosen. Coming in power would have compelled obedience, but not love. By arriving in total helplessness, God made space for a genuine response rather than mere compliance.
Q: Does God love me even at my worst?
A: Yes — and the Christmas story makes that specific. The shepherds in Luke 2 were social outcasts, the last people anyone would have chosen. God sent the birth announcement to them first. Romans 5:8 puts it plainly: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Not after improvement. Before it.
Q: What does it mean to "let God love you"?
A: It means releasing the idea that you have to earn it. Many people approach faith — or life in general — as a performance to be graded. Letting God love you is the practice of stopping that striving long enough to receive what you can't produce through effort. It's closer to surrender than self-improvement.
Q: Why did the angels appear to shepherds and not to important people?
A: In first-century culture, shepherds were considered unreliable and low-status. The fact that God chose them to receive the first Christmas announcement signals something deliberate — this news wasn't for the powerful or the put-together. It was, as the angel said, "for all the people."
Q: What is the difference between God wanting love versus wanting obedience?
A: Obedience can be demanded and enforced. Love cannot. The theological concept woven through the Christmas story — described in Philippians 2 using the Greek word kenosis, meaning "emptying" — is that God chose vulnerability over dominance specifically because love requires a real choice. He wanted a relationship, not a transaction.
