Our Glory

"Mild he lays his glory by..."--from the song, Hark the Herald Angels Sing

He had to know his glory in order to lay it by. He had to acknowledge the glory of his being in order to tenderly set it aside. Christ did so, becoming one of us humans, with all our chills and fevers and rages and heartbreaks, our germs and metatarsals and hair follicles and brain ganglia.

I'm thinking how often we reject our glory, refuse it, rather than follow Christ's example to lay it down. Yes, our glory comes from God alone. But there is this beautiful hint at the mystery that surrounds the core of our being. In the words of Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home

Isn't it marvellous to realize that we are in the image of Christ? This humanity thing is just temporary. Our story follows His story, and we, too, have come from God. Let us not forget. Let us remember that glory, know where it came from and Whose it truly is, and mildly, gently, lay it by.