Christmas and the Initiating God
I’ve been spending time lately with new friends in San Francisco, and a pattern keeps showing up in their questions. The questions have weight. They carry a kind of ache for intelligibility: Is there a story that’s actually true? And if there is, can we know it?
Let me give you three scenes.
Scene 1: A dinner table and “the God I don’t believe in”
I’m at a dinner table with five new friends. As the evening winds down, the conversation drifts, like it often does when people feel safe, toward what life is “really” about.
Two mention they’re atheists. I’ve grown fond of asking a question that often opens the conversation rather than shutting it down after a comment like that:
“Who’s the god you don’t believe in?”
Friend #1 answers quickly: “The old guy with the beard who’s angry at you.”
Friend #2 nods: “Same. The angry guy in the sky with the beard who’s mad at everyone.”
I remember thinking: That image is doing a lot of work. It’s a caricature plenty of religious people have accidentally helped paint: God as cosmic irritation, keeping score, waiting to scold. If that’s the god on offer, I understand the refusal.
But it also made me wonder: if that’s the default mental picture, how many people have rejected not God, but a grim little cartoon?
Scene 2: A lunch and the “all stories are made up” claim
A week ago, I’m at lunch with someone who’s thoughtful, sharp, and allergic to sentimental answers.
He says something like this: every grand narrative humans live by—every moral system, every story of meaning, every account of what we should want—was made by humans. Constructed and concocted. A survival and social-cohesion technology. Useful, maybe beautiful, but ultimately a projection.
His punchline: the highest enlightenment is to realize all stories are just stories. There are no true stories in any ultimate sense, only interpretations and agreements.
I respect the sobriety of that view. It’s trying to be honest. It’s trying not to cheat.
But it leaves a question hanging in the air: if all stories are human inventions, then the word “meaning” becomes empty of meaning. You can’t claim anything is real in the way gravity is real. It’s preference dressed up as purpose.
Scene 3: A lunch and the mystery of the universe
Then, yesterday, another lunch.
A friend describes the universe as fundamentally unintelligible: mysterious, difficult to parse, impossible to fully map onto human categories. And yet, she says, there’s this persistent sense of love—something real in us, something that drives us forward. Her conclusion is more poetic than dogmatic: maybe we emanate from some source, and love is the clue.
Again, I hear the ache for intelligibility. Not certainty, necessarily. but something that can bear the weight of being human.
So, a dinner, and two lunches. Three different takes. One shared question: Is there anything that can be known? And if so, how?
The fork in the road: revelation or improvisation
Here’s the claim I’m willing to make, and it’s not meant as a dunk, but as an honest fork in the road.
If there is no divine influence—no disclosure, no revelation, no Divine Person revealing themselves, no “information” coming from beyond the human project—then our ultimate stories really are improvisations. We can still build them. We can still live by them. We can still find them psychologically powerful.
But we can’t finally confirm them.
At best, we get coherence, not truth; maybe consensus, not reality. At best, meaning becomes a kind of beautiful, communal art project.
And that can be livable, until suffering, or guilt, or death, or love hit. Because those things demand more than “my current story preference.” They demand something like a verdict: What is good? What is a human being? Who or what is worth sacrificing for? What is love?
Now here’s the other side of the fork:
If God has spoken—if the Source of reality has disclosed something about reality—then there is such a thing as a true story, and not just in a poetic sense. There is a story that is knowable because it is revealed. Not because humans climbed high enough, but because God stooped low enough.
And if that is true, it changes what “meaning” is. Meaning isn’t something we manufacture. Meaning is something we receive—like discovering the plot you’re in, rather than inventing one to distract yourself.
A quieter observation: the hunger that betrays the theory
Here’s what struck me about my friends. Even when someone adopts a philosophy that says “there is no ultimate meaning,” they often still experience the hunger for ultimate meaning. The longing doesn’t politely disappear because the theory says it should.
I know that doesn’t automatically prove anything: desire isn’t a proof. People desire plenty of things that aren’t real.
But desire is data.
When people feel haunted by beauty, convicted by conscience, wrecked by love, or unsettled by death, it’s worth asking whether the hunger itself is a clue about the kind of universe we’re in.
The initiating God: an author who writes himself into the story
This is where Christmas becomes more than cozy aesthetics and nostalgia.
Christianity makes a peculiar claim: God is not distant, not indifferent, not merely a force. God is personal, more like an author than an abstraction.
And here’s the astonishing twist: the Author doesn’t merely write characters and watch them scramble for meaning. The Author initiates. The Author moves toward the characters. The Author writes himself into the story.
Not as the angry man in the sky with a beard, furious at the world, but as the One who loves his creation: who loves, intensely, the people inside it.
The Christian claim is not, “Humans finally figured God out.” The Christian claim is, “God came near.”
That’s Christmas: the arrival of God in person, inside history, inside time, inside flesh.
A thread running through Scripture: God moves first
When I read the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, I’m struck by how often God is the one doing the pursuing.
In the garden, after rupture and hiding, God asks a question that sounds less like interrogation and more like grief: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3). God initiates even after humans withdraw.
In the wilderness, God chooses to “dwell” among a people through the tabernacle—a strange and beautiful idea: not just a deity to appease, but a God who says, “Come, meet with me.” (Exodus imagery of the tabernacle)
Through the prophets, there’s a promise of a deeper knowing—one that won’t depend on social proximity to religious experts: “They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” (Jeremiah 31’s new-covenant promise). Again: God initiating knowledge, not merely demanding performance.
God confronts Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3), not as a philosophical conclusion Moses reaches, but as a God who interrupts Moses’ life with presence and calling.
And then, at the center: Jesus.
Christianity claims Jesus is not merely a teacher pointing toward God. Jesus is God with us—God taking the ultimate initiative to be known, not just inferred.
And even after Jesus’ earthly life, the claim continues: God doesn’t merely visit; God remains. Jesus promises the Spirit—the Comforter, the Advocate—God’s presence with people “forever” in the ongoing mess of actual life (the language of John 14–16).
So if you’re tracking the plotline, it’s consistent: God is the initiator.
What would “life’s project” be, if this is true?
If the story is true—if God has written himself into our world so that we can know him—then “life’s project” is not mainly self-invention or self-optimization.
Life’s project becomes relationship.
To know the Author. To be remade by the Author. To align your desires with what is real and good. To receive meaning as gift, and then to live it out as love.
That doesn’t eliminate mystery. It doesn’t erase doubt or suffering. It doesn’t make every day feel luminous.
But it does relocate the center of gravity: you are not trapped in a silent universe trying to project significance onto chaos. You are being addressed.
And if that’s true, it’s not only good news for us. It’s somehow—astonishingly—good news for God too. Christianity dares to say God doesn’t merely tolerate relationship. God wants it. God delights in it.
Christmas, in one line
Christmas is the story of the initiating God: the Author stepping into the pages, so the characters can stop guessing in the dark and begin to know the One who made them.
If your picture of God is the angry bearded man in the sky, I get why you’d reject that. Or if you feel that perhaps no stories are knowably true, I get that too.
But Christmas is an invitation to consider a different picture: not a God who stands far off, arms crossed, issuing demands—but a God who comes near, opens his hands, and says: Here I am.