Merry Christmas!!!

I want to wish all my readers, known and unknown, friends and family, all the amazing people who wander in and out of these pages, a merry, merry Christmas.

We are all in so many different places, in this world, in our lives, in our hearts and minds and years, and I am grateful for the small moments that we get to connect here.  I re-read my Christmas post from last year, and back then, I wrote about being "ready for Christmas".  And how I wasn't.  And yet, was.

I think it still applies today, for me.  I wrote about Mary and Joseph, and how, outwardly, they were incredibly unready for the birth of Jesus.  They didn't even have a room for Mary to give birth in, let alone a midwife...or ice chips...or heated blankets...or an epidural.  They had nothing, and yet they still found themselves holding everything. In their arms. In their hearts.

Grace and I have much more than Mary and Joseph did back then.  In the context of our time, our culture, the "way things are done", though, we're lagging behind. Money is tight. We're both celebrating the end of the last semester with illness.  The tree is already dried out...who was in charge of keeping it watered, anyway? But that's okay.  Because we tend to live our lives in "His" time, anyway.  And in Jesus' time, there is room for joy in the pain.  There is a place for laughter through the tears.  Love shines brighter than the hatred.  Truth obliterates the lies.  There is Life in the manger, in the fatigue, in the grime, in the dark...and beyond death.

This morning in church, we sang "The Little Drummer Boy".  It's my favorite Christmas song.  I love the message of being small and having little to give, offering it anyway and seeing God smile with delight.  Not because of the gift, but because of the giver...the Beloved.  Us.  Me.

So I sang with all my heart, clutching a wad of wet Kleenex, my voice choked with tears...

And God smiled at me.