a christmas card and a prayer

on the way to work this morning, i thought about baby Jesus. about little chubby fingers. about flushed cheeks. the way babies smell. about a tired mama and a proud papa. about hay bales and donkeys and night stars and the cold. then i thought about the cross on the hill and i couldn't bring myself to think about it anymore and had to turn on a pop song.

my heart aches for what mary didn't fully know. my spirit crumbles to pieces when i think about swaddling a savior. because it's all so tortuously beautiful. and sad and sweet and precious and wild. i pray that this realization never leaves me. that i feel just as impacted on a pretty thursday evening in the spring, under the shade trees in the front of the house with my arm under robert, as i do this morning, two days before christmas. that the knowledge of the blessing sticks to my ribs, sustaining me on nights spent kneeling and mornings spent over the coffee pot.

it's a comfortable life, typically. there are sunrises and twilights. there are hands held across wooden tables and  pillows that smell of summer. there are children laughing on hilltops and dogs with wet noses to greet us at the close of the day.

but to have this? to achieve this unspeakable beauty? it took one incredible sacrifice. but before all that. before the nails and the beating. before the crown of thorns and the bleeding.

there was one incredible birth.