Christmas in San Diego

The oddyssy has begun. I left Philadelphia on Christmas Eve with a change of planes in Las Vegas (where they have banks of slot machines in the waiting area of the airport!) and arrived in San Diego.

In San Diego I stepped outside the airport into the bright sunshine, stood under a palm tree and said, "Yes! I have indeed arrived in San Diego!" Unlike the hazy, diffused light of Philadelphia, light here where the humidity is low and the air clear, is intensely bright (unless the area happens to be on fire, as happened recently) and the temperatures at the warmest part of the day reach the 70's. It's beautiful!

On Christmas day we took a short hike through an area that had been burned in the fire. One can see where the fire came over the hillside and burned here and there as the winds gusted. The earth and the trees and grass have been blackened, but in the weeks since the fire they have received an extraordinary 2 inches of rain (this area is, after all, dessert) and new grass is growing amid the ashes. It's like spring! It reminds me of God's promise to give us "beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning." In the very short time since fire raged through this area, fanned by the Santa Ana winds, God has already begun the process of renewal.

In my devotions on Christmas I read the section on the Incarnation in Jim Boice's book, Foundations of the Christian Faith and was reminded that the whole purpose of Christ's becoming a man was to be the atonement for our sins. "You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." Dr. Boice reminds of Anselm of Canterbury's explanation, basically that since mankind sinned, a human being needed to be involved in the atonement. However since we are the ones who messed up in the first place, we weren't sufficient to atone for our sin. Since only God was good enough to be the atonement, the one making atonement had to be both God and man, therefore Jesus had to come as God and as a human being, the God man. There the chief focus of Christmas is not just the manger in Bethlehem, but the cross of Calvary.