From our vantage point on a small hill near the school, we observed a young family of tent dwellers, a father, a mother and their newborn baby, sitting outside a solitary tent in the middle of a large plain in the desert night.
“A poor family,” said the teacher, “holding their newborn baby out in the elements, under the stars. It could almost be a scene from Scripture, from Bethlehem. Can you fathom the miracle of it? The God who created the universe now a helpless baby inside the universe He created…the Almighty become the weakest of beings … the hands that stretched out the heavens now too weak to even grasp the hand of His mother…the eyes that see all things now can barely focus…the mouth that spoke the universe into existence now can only offer up the cry of a helpless baby. How amazing is that? It is the miracle of love … the humility of love … and the miracle of specificity.”
“Specificity?”
“God is omnipresent, everywhere at once. But in the Incarnation, He becomes specific to time and space, to only one point of space and to only one moment of time. God is universal, the light of the world, the spring of all existence. Yet now He becomes specific to one culture, one people, one tribe, one house, one genealogy, one family, one life. The universal God of all existence becomes a Jewish baby, a Jewish boy, then a Jewish rabbi, walking in sandals on the ground and dust of first-century Judea.
Everything He does is now contained in one specific place and one specific moment of time. He forgives specific sinners, embraces specific outcasts, multiplies specific loaves of bread and touches specific people and heals them of their infirmities.”
“How does one apply that?” I asked. read more 
