I’m so happy to share this reflection written by my friend Kayla Huemer. I met Kayla during my first year of veterinary school through Bible study, and what a blessing that was. I seem to learn something new from every conversation I have with Kayla. She is brilliant and so inquisitive as to how God is working in her daily life and through those around her. She loves searching for ways to combine her passion of science with her identity in Christ, which I think shines through in this beautiful essay. Merry Christmas to all my Paws in Praise readers, and may this reflection bring the joy of the Christmas season into your hearts.
“While attending Christmas service, I was praying for a child-like rekindling of the awe and excitement of Christmas. To truly meditate on the gravity of what our celebration today represents. Yes, sure – it’s to acknowledge the miracle of God becoming flesh – fully God, fully man come to save the world of its sin. But what made this moment, over 2 millennia ago, so incredible?
As I fought to humble my heart, to quiet it amidst the service, my mind got hung up on a certain line of a Christmas hymn we sang – “O Holy Night”:
Oh holy night
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
Long lay the world in sin and error, pining
‘Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth
The soul felt its worth.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that line. My mind raced in a million directions. If you haven’t learned this about me already, I love analogies. In this case, an engineering analogy. I realized this hymn line resonated with my understanding of the inverse square law – an equation that relates the distance between two objects with their influence on each other (bear with me here for a second). It’s a beautifully simplistic equation that governs many phenomena of nature: Gravity, intensity of light, magnetism.
Inverse square law: Intensity = 1 /(distance between the objects)2
In other words, as the objects draw closer together, the intensity of the phenomena increases as the square of the distance between them decreases.
To explain this analogy a bit better, I imagine a soul – pre-Christ’s birth – as a compass whose needle points in line with the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field is like the infinite love God has for the souls on Earth – an intangible force that the compasses (souls of Israel) couldn’t quite wrap their head around. They believed the force was there (their needles all pointed the same direction without much more explanation), but there was no way to fully and truly understand the power and strength of that love (aka magnetic force).
So God sent his Son. Love made incarnate. Transcending through space and time, to close that distance. As he approached the earth, the needles of all the compasses (souls) wavered, pointing now instead to God made flesh. He became so close, the distance rapidly diminishing, to take on a body. To manifest his love. To help the soul understand the power of the love that always existed. By coming to Earth, our compasses flickered, guided by this new measure of his love.
The distance diminished. The power of his love felt exponentially stronger, just as many natural phenomena increase in intensity as the distance diminishes. The soul felt its worth.“
– Kayla Huemer, Christmas 2020