“You only know Pikachu?”

The tiny voice of an alert 8 year-old calls through the bedroom door.

“Hello? Are you ready?”

I am, of course, not ready. I am not yet out of bed, and I am certainly not in peak condition for a pokémon battle.

One of the many things I like about hanging out with kids is that they make it hard to take yourself too seriously. That morning, the only thing that counts is my ability to name Pokémon.

“You only know Pikachu?!”

Unfortunately for me, pokémon isn’t really my area. This confession meets a lot of disbelief, confusion, and even a bit of pity. I’m relieved when we reach the safer territory of Lego.

I love that kids don’t pretend. Adults disguise their horror when they discover my woeful knowledge of pokémon; kids never do.

Just as kids bring us back to what’s real and unpolished, Jesus does the same by fully embracing his humanity. As a Christian, it is significant that Jesus is a person. Christians are always very keen to stress that Jesus is God, which is true, but this is sometimes at the cost of forgetting that Jesus is also human.

Jesus himself uses the title ‘Son of Man’ in preference to ‘Son of God’. In the Old Testament, ‘Son of Man’ is a term that often simply means a human being, a mortal. But in the book of Daniel, it also refers to a mysterious, divine figure who comes with the clouds of heaven. When Jesus uses this title, he is identifying with both the ordinariness of being human and the extraordinary call to bring God’s kingdom to earth.

In calling himself the ‘Son of Man’, Jesus grounds himself in the shared experience of being human. And at the same time, Jesus goes beyond our experience of being human by living out what it means to be fully alive in the presence of God.

Jesus being human means I can have faith and relate to God within my humanness, because God is human. Jesus is the human face of God.

This is what makes the idea of the incarnation powerful. It’s not just God becoming human at a specific point of history as a one-off. It’s the truth that God, and God’s grace, is found in our normal, everyday, and very human lives. Sam Keen put it well when he said, “Incarnation, if it means anything more than a ‘once upon a time’ story, means grace is carnal; healing comes through flesh.” Grace meets us in our humanity, not in spite of it.

In the midst of my summer holiday from work, this means that my kid-hang-out time is actually more what God has intended for my life of faith than my time at a laptop. Insofar as hanging out allows me to be more fully human, unpolished, and myself, it allows me to more readily meet with God.

We don’t have to pretend with God, just like we don’t have to pretend with kids. Jesus lived a human life and, in doing so, showed us that our own lives, in all their complexity, are sacred. Our humanness is not something to escape from.

So if you ever find yourself not quite ready for a Pokémon battle, enjoy the moment. Let it remind you that God meets us where we are, in the midst of our unpolished—very human—lives. There’s no need to be anything other than who we are.