I have a cold.  I do not like colds.  Colds are bad.  I don’t know who gave it to me but it doesn’t matter, I can’t give it back .  There are infections that are annoying and inconvenient but did you know that there are good infections?  In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote about a “good infection.”  I’ll quote him, “Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection.  If you want to get warm, you must stand near the fire; if you want to get wet, you must get into the water.  If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to the thing that has them.  They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.”  In other words, if we want eternal life, we’re going to have to get close to the One who has it.  The good news is, He has come close to us.  Emmanuel has come to infect us with the kind of life He has.  We can become partakers of the Divine nature.  This won’t happen overnight by using our Bible as a pillow.  The process will in fact produce fruit if we chose to seek Him, repent when necessary and obey Him faithfully.  This is an infection we want and Advent is the reminder of how this good infection was made possible.  I’ll be relieved when the Christmas cold is gone but I never want the infection of His life made possible through the First Advent to ever stop!