The birth of Jesus is the ultimate outsider moment in history. We’ve long since dressed it up with tinsel and lights, making it something merry, pretty and popular. We celebrate with gaiety, food, song, gifts and warm, crackling fireplace fires. In the process, we’ve divorced ourselves from the starker, darker reality of the actual event, where a babe lay swaddled in a pile of straw, nervously watched over by two very human, very perplexed parents. By any objective measurement, the original Christmas moment was nothing we would want to celebrate as a crowning achievement. More likely, it was a desperate, cold, lonely affair.
And yet it is precisely the unreserved honesty of the story from which we draw a timeless sense of hope, as our darker human colors get shot through with divine light. Because the fact is, we all exist outside perfection, no less the babe in the manger. READ MORE >>>
