Advent: Why a Stable?

 

This simple poem has a powerful message for me. I hope that it will encourage your heart, that it will help you to understand the depths of the love and grace and goodness that our Savior has for you.

“Let the Stable Still Astonish”

 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.”

Poem by: Leslie Leyland Fields