Christmas revolutionizes our knowledge of God through the incarnation of Jesus the Son in the flesh.  At Christmas we are introduce to The Triune God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who relate together as distinctive persons as one being.  God relates!  What we see in the Gospel of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit reveals a way of relating that is mutual serving love.  The way we apprehend or are apprehended by the knowledge of God has tremendous influence on the nature and projectory of our relationships.  Growth in my knowledge of the Triune God through Christ can restore to me the relating capacity for love.  This growth is not without its pain.  In fact the movement into God’s glory is not without struggle.  (See John 13:27-35)  It seems to me that apart from the fresh and daily work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit I would easily drift into the tides of control or passivity in the context of marriage, parenting, friendship, and community.  However, by entering often into the mystery of the Gospel and the revolutionary perspective of a God whose very existence is relational–Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I am also called to honor the distictiveness of the people with whom I share life.  I am called to love as a third way contrary to the ways of control or passivity.  To love is to engage in the creation of a “we.”