My New Advent Read!!

Each Advent I re-read certain books... "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens...."The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" by Barbara Robinson...and now I'm going to add another...

"God is in the Manger" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer... 

Here's one of my favorites from a letter he wrote from prison to his fiance Maria von Wedemeyer in 1943...

"Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours - why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand...

And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger; wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever man can do to us, they cannot but serve God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives."

Powerful stuff, eh?  And that was only part of one day!!