This is our world right now: dark, snowy, cold, perfectly beautiful.

The nights between now and Christmas are the longest nights of the year. Looking at the weather forecast, it doesn’t appear we’ll have many starry nights.

If we do, on Monday night, we may have the privilege of viewing a total lunar eclipse, which is a very cool astronomical phenomenon, but it’s also a little disconcerting, to have it take place this week, because we know we’re waiting for a star and this seems like the opposite kind of sign.

Most of the time, the moon reflects the sun’s light toward the earth at night, sometimes a full disc of it and sometimes just a little sliver, depending on their respective positions. But on that night, the earth will get between the sun and the moon, which means that not only will the moon not get any light, none of the sun’s light will be reflected back at the side of the earth that’s turned away from the sun.

Right now, that seems like a pretty good image to use to understand our lives. It’s been a difficult year for so many people   This year, it feels like so many people we know are living in the shadow of something: an illness, a loss, a struggling relationship, a fear, an unmet need. When, we wonder, will the star come?

A pastor’s job is to reflect the light, and just to be there while people struggle. This time of year, I have to be there a lot, so we have been spending most of our nights at the little mountain house next to the church, rather than driving 50 snowy miles each way every time there’s a caroling party, a Christmas pageant, a musical practice or a service.  People stop by to talk, to ask for a sign of hope. There’s no television, nowhere in town to shop, just books and quiet and snow outside.

Autumn was dry and we began to worry that winter would be too, but snow has been falling since midweek, until it’s about elbow-high now. The front walk has become a narrow tunnel once more. The snow that has slid off the roof in the back of the house has now reached the eaves. Most of the details of our yard are lost to us until spring. In the little square of yard that gains snow from the roof, the driveway and two lengths of sidewalk, we’re developing a small mountain.

A warm bed is a true pleasure on a snowy night, and last night we were nestled all snug in ours, insulated from the world, sleeping hard, partly because our lives are good and our consciences our clear, but mostly because we’d shoveled several tons of snow yesterday afternoon.

 And into the silence, very near to our ears, burst a loud “whoomph!”

In the mountains in winter, that sound signals bad things: an avalanche, a roof collapse, a house fire that has reached a propane tank. After a moment spent poised, listening, we leapt from our bed, scrambled into jeans and sweaters and boots and raced out the front door, into a night that was so absolutely still that we began to doubt we’d heard any sound at all. There was no residual rumble of snow settling into a path left by a slide. There were no sparks in the night sky, no creaking timbers, no screams, no one else racing to help neighbors deal with a disaster. There were pickup tracks down the road, but they continued straight to the highway rather than leading toward a ditch or a building. We stood for several moments, listening carefully, straining for clues to what we’d heard. There was nothing, but there had been something, and it was hard for either of us to imagine it was something good.

Finally we turned to go back to bed, and my eye was caught by the smallest corner of color against the snow in our yard. My husband, a foot taller than I, leaned out over the snow to grab it, scrabbling with ungloved fingers to free it from the snow.

It was a Dollar General bag wrapped around a doll, a Baby Jesus from a crèche, old enough to be made from plaster rather than fiberglass, and heavy because of that. The baby was dark-haired and olive skinned; not a smiling cherub-chubby Renaissance infant or modern doll but a realistic Mediterranean newborn. A long-ago artist had swept dark eyelashes down over cheeks given a hint of shape by tiny bones. His eyes were closed but there was no doubt they’d be brown. His nose was more than a button. The swaddling clothes were lovingly fashioned rags, painted with such talent that we understood they were wrinkled and stained but clean.

The artisan who had crafted this Christ Child had known the story well, and the doll seemed likely to be an artifact from the town’s mining past, maybe stolen from the Catholic church, long shuttered but still standing. He’s chipped and worn, but that’s ok. He’s old.

And all we could say was, "Wow, we'll have a story to tell, as soon as we can figure out what it means." 

Who tossed him into our yard? We may never know. Perhaps it was a guilt-struck thief. Perhaps it was someone who’d had him in an attic for many years and decided we could use him, although there’s no reason they couldn’t have knocked on our door in broad daylight, or at least laid him gently on the porch in the middle of the night.

Why was he sent to us?  And what will we do with him? That was the immediate question. We made sure he was dry, wrapped him in a cotton dish towel and nestled him on the sofa. That didn’t seem quite right, but it was the best we could do with an unexpected child.

That’s the way grace works: We never expect it, never know quite what to do with it. After it lands in our lives, or in our yards, we have to pick it up, dry it off, warm it up and accept it for our own. We have to turn it over and over in our hands and our hearts to figure out how it's going to fit , decide whether we have the courage to love, to lift our faces to the light, to let hope be born in us today.

 From the Iona Community, an excerpt from “Cloth for the Cradle”: