A Man Like Us

A Christmas Story

There was a family who lived on a farm, and the mother of the family was very devout and always took the children to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. The Father seldom went to church; he had little use for religion.  On that Christmas Eve, there was a terrible blizzard, but even though was snowing heavily, the mother dressed up the children and headed out the door to the Church for the Christmas Liturgy. The father went to the barn to make sure that all the animals were safe from the storm.  

In the snow outside the door of the barn, he saw a mother bird and several babies. They were cold and confused, disoriented by the storm, and he opened the barn door with the hope that they would go into the warm barn and wait out the storm.  However whenever he would approach the birds to try to drive them into the barn, they would become frightened and try to get away from him, going further out into the snow.  No matter what he did, he couldn't help them.  And he thought to himself, "If only I were bird like one of them, then they would follow me and I could lead them to safety." And suddenly, in that moment, he understood why God might become man, about Jesus the Christ, and the need to come as one of us. He got dressed, surprised his family at church and was a believer from that day on. 

“God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine.”

(Paul Harvey told this story on one of his radio shows. I originally heard it from Bernadette at a winter retreat. This is not a quote but my own memory of the story.)