"Is Anything Too Wonderful for God?"

I discovered Sara Groves last Christmas on the radio and downloaded her holiday album, Oh Holy Night, to enjoy this season.  I love her folksy voice and her original arrangements for the traditional hymns I've sung since childhood.  In the last several years, the words of songs like "Oh Holy Night" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" have held new, poignant meaning anyway.  But somehow, listening to the lyrics in a different rhythm, with a different melody, invites yet another, new reflection.

This song, "It's True," which begins and ends with Groves' young son narrating the encounter between the angel Gabriel and Mary, nearly brings me to tears every time.  The incarnation itself is miraculous.  But the idea that God would send a baby--not an army, not a natural disaster, not a political powerhouse--to save the world leaves me reeling in wonder.

"But this is too wonderful," Mary says.

"Is anything too wonderful for God?" the angel replies.

...No.  For nothing is impossible with God.  And if God is love, and if nothing is impossible, then we are in for some wonders.

At the end of the song, the young boy describes the star shining above the stable in Bethlehem, "like a spotlight" on the baby Jesus "showing people the way to him," because, he says, "God was like a new dad.  He couldn't keep the good news to himself.  He'd been waiting all these long years for this moment.  And now, he couldn't wait to tell...everyone."

In the world, often those who believe this story muck it up, convolute it, add their own interpretations and regulations and conditions, stripping it of it's glory.  But at it's heart, this is a love story.  It's good news.  God saved the world with a baby: helpless, defenseless, needy, intimate--subject to all the injustices and failures of those around him that the rest of us face every day, bearing it all to destruction on the cross, in his body broken, blood shed.

In this story, there are no uzis, there is no fire from the sky.  Just a baby God, lying humbly in a food trough, for the love of us.

It is too wonderful.


It's True 

(featuring Toby Groves)

by Sara Groves

In your heart you know it's true though you hold no expectation in the deepest part of you there's an open hesitation but it's true kingdoms and crowns a God who came down to find you it's true Angels on high sing through the night alleluya heard it told you think it's odd the whole thing fraught with complication the play begins with baby God and all His blessed implications but it's true kingdoms and crowns a God who came down to find you it's true Angels on high sing through the night alleluia alleluia, alleluia Oh it's true kingdoms and crowns a God who came down to find you it's true Angels on high sing through the night alleluia