This is not the first time I’ve posted this poem here. In fact, I try to post it every year around this time because it speaks so beautifully to the true meaning of Christmas. That God should be born as a baby on a dirt floor in a stable is no less marvelous than that God should come into my heart and be born there.

God didn’t wait for me to get cleaned up or get my act together or finally figure out my life. He didn’t wait for me to come to Him. He came to me where I was in the middle of my mess and make me all those things I could never have made myself — clean, whole, pure, with a purpose.

May this poem still speak to you as it still speaks to me:

“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).