God in the straw

just a quick thought from fredrick beakner:

“The child Jesus is born in the night among the sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts, and nothing is ever the same again. Those who believe in God can never, in a way, be sure of him again. Once they see him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go, or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of human kind.

If holiness and God in all his glory were present in this least auspicious of events--this birth of a peasant's child--then there is no place or time so lowly and earth-bound, but that holiness can be present there too. If God's in the straw and the dung, then all events can become holy. And this means that we are never safe and that there are never places we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break into and recreate the human heart, because it is just where God seems most helpless that he is most strong and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully."

and check out this 2007 article in TIME magazine on rob bell.