Of Tweets, cellphone calls and wanting to be loved ...

So I can’t help but feel bad for Manti Te’o.

I mean, put yourself in his shoes. You’re a talented college football player, your team goes undefeated in the regular season, and you make it to the national championship game. And tragically, you lose your grandmother to cancer along the way, and your girlfriend.

Only it turns out, your girlfriend doesn’t actually exist. She’s a fiction, an internet and cellphone phantasm created by “friends” who apparently wanted you to be the butt of some kind of weird, crazy prank.

I’m sure there are plenty of revelations to come in this story. Maybe Manti Te’o is a more active participant in this whole bizarre tale than we’ve been led to believe so far, but here’s the thing – if he really is the victim in this strange saga, then all he’s really guilty of is believing and hoping there was someone on the other end of the phone calls and the Tweets who wanted to connect with him in a meaningful way. All he’s guilty of is wanting to be loved.

But how do you love someone you’ve never actually met? How do you love someone who is nothing more than a disembodied voice and a series of 140-character messages?

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Sometimes, when I read the Old Testament, I feel sorry for the nation of Israel. You can’t help but come to the conclusion they were pretty much a bunch of knuckleheads – God gave them the rules of the game, but they messed up over and over and over again.

The leaders of Israel – Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joshua, Moses and David – appear to have regularly had personal encounters of various kinds with the God of the universe. But the regular folks – the shepherds, the farmers, the laborers – seem like they’re mostly flying blind. Remember when Moses climbed Mt. Sinai to talk to God? He brings back the 10 commandments to share with everyone, but while he’s gone, the people of Israel give up any semblance of faithfulness.

When Moses is away, the people will play. Because how do you love someone who is invisible, and who only speaks to a select few?

I think God knew it would be really difficult for people to follow him when they couldn’t see him, when all they had to go on was the testimony of their leaders and some words on paper – like Manti Te’o and his fictional girlfriend, Israel had the ancient version of Tweets and cellphones, but what it needed was a face-to-face encounter with God Himself.

Which is why I love the Christmas story. At its heart, the story of Christmas is the story of God becoming one of us, of God in the flesh, of God with skin on. It’s the story of Jesus becoming the visible expression of the invisible God.

When I wonder about the character of God, about who He really is, about what He really stands for, I turn to Jesus. I read about how he interacted with people, how he loved his disciples, how he forgave the woman at the well, how he turned water into wine, how he chased the moneychangers out of the temple, how he calmed storms and healed the sick and fed 5,000 hungry souls with a little bread and some fish.

It’s ironic, really – God’s deity is clarified and sharpened when it’s filtered through His humanity. God knew we needed more than Tweets and cellphone calls to really have a relationship with him – we needed a face-to-face, flesh-and-blood encounter.

And so he gave us Himself – He gave us Jesus.

And that makes all the difference.