‘Tis the season for a steady diet of well-wishing, nostalgia, prayers and pleadings for sanity all wrapped up in Christmas cheer.

In tech circles it is the dreaded “busy season” where we say good-bye to our families and friends after Thanksgiving and return to them on January 3. For that reason, we tend to focus on how to not lose Jesus in the middle of Christmas or something of that sort. I actually like those articles, but I want to share something different—a meditative reflection, of sorts, in the form of one of my favorite quotes.

This is the closing passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. 

And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who have ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed his tears, He showed them plainly on an open face at any daily sight, such as the far off sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something.

Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatist are proud of concealing their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something.

I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

[emphasis added]

So here is my prayer for you during this wonderful season of the Christmas Story:

That His prophetic light would lead you to new places of revelation and worship.

That His joy would surround you and warm you like swaddling clothes.

That in the humble spaces of our lives, we would make room and find the birth of the miraculous.

That this year we would not only catch the glimmer of God’s full brilliance and vibrancy peaking through during this Christmas season; but, this year, we would live within His laughter!