On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me
a partridge in a pear tree.

Traditionally, the partridge in the pear tree represents Jesus Christ.

A single gift. Quiet. Almost unimpressive when set against the noise and excess that so often surrounds Christmas. No spectacle. No army. No certainty. Just one living thing, held in the branches of a tree.

The Christian story begins this way on purpose.

“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
— John 1:14

Jesus does not arrive as an idea to be agreed with, or a system to be enforced. He arrives embodied, vulnerable, exposed to harm. God chooses nearness over control, relationship over dominance.

In a world where the news is filled with images of conflict, displacement, ecological grief, and political fracture, the problems feel overwhelming. The scale of suffering can make us feel small, ineffective, tempted toward despair or numbness.

Broken Theology resists the idea that God solves the world by standing above it. Instead, God enters the branches. God abides in fragile places. God takes the risk of being present.

Hope, then, does not begin with fixing everything.
It begins with attention—with noticing where love has taken root, even when it looks precarious and small.

The partridge does not escape the tree.
It trusts the tree to hold it.

---

May God dwell with you
in fragile, open branches—
love choosing to stay.