Last night I took a tub at the end of the day (that's what they say here, "take a tub") and I grabbed an old favorite from the shelf because I needed a little comfort and bolstering and I soaked in that hot water with Chesterton (the kind of author that you read slow and twice over because his words are heavy and thick with meaning) and I had to cut it short, had to hop out, dry off, run to the next room because it was the kind of thing that you read and have to share with another person.  It was too much for just me.

So I snuggled in next to him and read grand words out loud and together we puzzled over the old story made into something unfamiliar and I fell a little more in that moment for my Savior and for husband and it was hard to sleep last night because life has felt so sad and bleak this week, so sad.  But together we read words that shook our Spirits and reminded us of the power of His birth, the power of the cross and of the early church living and growing underground.

I had traded the might of God for the meekness of Christianity and last night the tension came to a head.  If I am to follow and love and preach a Christ King, born in a cave and hunted from the beginning by destruction, I must also love the fierceness He was born into and the turmoil that came from His presence in an unsuspecting world.  Because I follow a King who did not leave us to ourselves, who was born in the earth and who waged a war we would never win-- who is fighting still for this broken piece of humanity, a clumsy follower who worries too often and fumbles with prayers and is always running out of love.

"All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago.  But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace.  By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw's den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out.  It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky.  It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ.  It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory.  There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world, of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.  That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave.  It is already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth.  And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven."
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man