I think I post this poem just about every year because every year I see it pop up in my memories and it still impacts me so powerfully. To imagine that the God of the universe would allow Himself to enter the world through a dirty stable (or a dirty cave) is one thing. To know that God has chosen our hearts filled with all sorts of unclean and dirty things that we keep hidden from everyone else to be born into is almost too good to be true. But it is true.

And here’s the poem:

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: “Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
Be born here, in this place”?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
of our hearts and says, “Yes,
let the God of Heaven and Earth
be born here–
in this place.” (Leslie Leyland Fields, Let the Stable Still Astonish)