The adorable baby becomes one of the group of young people who hangs around on street corners, gathering with friends in a public place for safety but unnerving others in the neighbourhood and we do not always find it easy to see that young person as the infinitely precious and infinitely adorable person that they once were.
The adorable baby ends up as a child imprisoned in a detention centre – separated from her mother in a dawn raid just because her mother is seeking sanctuary in our country. We seem to have forgotten how infinitely adorable and infinitely precious those children once were
The adorable baby even in this country ends up living in poverty. Close to home in Sunderland over 50% of children are living in poverty. Many in the Council and elsewhere are working hard to do something about it. But somehow it has happened and I am left wondering whether if we had continued to see those children as infinitely adorable and infinitely precious things might be different
The Christmas story is a story of a baby – a baby who is most certainly infinitely precious and infinitely adorable to Mary and Joseph and for Christians the world over rightly adorable and rightly precious because he is God come to share our human life. But the real point of the story is not that the baby is infinitely precious but that we are infinitely precious.