A Glimpse of Starlight

I stumbled across this poem in Jan Karon’s Light from Heaven, and it stirs me every time I read it.  Let it remind you again of the wonder of the season — and of the gospel.

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