Saturday, December 20, 2025

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see
and my self is the earth’s shadow
that keeps me from seeing all the moon.
The crescent is very beautiful
and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see;
but what I am afraid of, dear God,
is that my self shadow will grow so large
that it blocks the whole moon,
and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know You God
because I am in the way.
Please help me to push myself aside.
-Flannery O’Connor



Josh Garrels, "O Come O Come Emmanuel" (OFFICIAL AUDIO)

Josh Garrels, "Shepherds Song" (OFFICIAL AUDIO)

Thursday, December 18, 2025

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are 
His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.
George MacDonald



The Word became flesh.
Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed.
Incarnation.
It is not tame.
It is not beautiful.
It is uninhabitable terror.
It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light.
Agonized laboring led to it,
vast upheavals of intergalactic space,
time split apart,
a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself.
You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this:
“God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”
Came down.
Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see.
It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms.
It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

-Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark



Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.
And now, after all,
there he lies,
fast asleep.


-Luci Shaw 'Descent'



Unto Us/Triptych

Chris Tomlin - A Christmas Alleluia (Live) ft. Lauren Daigle, Leslie Jordan

HAEVN - We Are (Live in Amsterdam)