Have you ever thought about what it would be like to meet baby Jesus? What would your reaction be? Would you ooh and aah over the smallness and the preciousness of Him? Would you weep as you held the incarnate Lord? Would you speechlessly observe and take weeks to process what you witnessed? Would you marvel at the sheer wonder and beauty of the moment, as you met the God of heaven and earth, finally come to be with His people?

My daughter is learning to self-soothe when she goes to sleep. If she wakes up when we drop her in her crib, or if she wakes in the middle of the night, she tends to cry. But weeks ago, she cried for a long period of time, now she’s starting to only cry for a minute at most. Somehow, she's developing that ability to calm down and go back to sleep.

I remember being a kid and feeling that uneasy feeling of laying awake in your bed and not being able to fall asleep. At some point, I learned at school that Jesus’ name has the power to drive out fear, and I decided to apply it to that creepy feeling that something will come crawling out of the shadows in your dark room. I started to just say aloud, into the darkness the name of Jesus. Even now when that feeling comes over me I do the same thing. And always, without fail, I instantly feel a calm come over me, driving out my fear.

On July 11, 2024, Lily Anne Wente was born at 11:29 a.m. She weighed 8 lbs 2 oz and measures 21.5 inches long.

Exactly one year ago, my little family found itself in a moment of crisis. Sam’s job came to an end at the church in North Carolina. For months, he was scouring job boards looking for a new pastoral job while delivering pizzas to help supplement our income. Church job searches are a long, drawn out process, and most require you to appear at the church and guest preach so the congregation can meet you, your family, and get an idea of how you would shepherd the church.

When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.

Picture this: The world seems to hold its breath and is eerily still. The wind whips through cold, damp trenches as the minutes tick into the wee hours of the morning. The year is 1914 and you are a soldier in the army holding down the western front against the Germans in World War I. The war began earlier that year at the beginning of the summer, and has been relentless ever since. If you were crazy enough to poke your head out of the trench to look across No Man’s Land, the bodies laying out in the cold would be staggering– a fresh dusting of snow being their only burial shroud. You miss your family, your hometown, and your own warm bed. It almost seems like a lifetime away as you sit at the bottom of this trench, the soil packed hard and unforgiving. You count the days since you’ve been here when it occurs to you; it’s Christmas Eve.

Today, we begin with a laugh: Sam was scrolling through Twitter a few nights ago and started to chuckle. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that someone asked via tweet, “Who is Harold Angel?” Of course, this person would be confusing Mr. Harold Angel with the opening line of the same Christmas hymn called, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The lyrics were originally written by Charles Wesley as a poem and later put to music by George Whitfield in 1753, when the original first line– Hark, how the welkin (heaven) rings– was revised to what we know and love today. What strikes most historians about this hymn is the lyrics; not only are they theologically sound, but they are beautifully put. In three stanzas, this song presents the Gospel in a meaningful and succinct way, which is probably why it has stood the test of time– almost 300 years to be exact.

On September 2nd, 2022, Piper was born at 11:33 pm at 7 lbs 5 oz, 21 inches long. After all that time waiting, and at 41 weeks, 5 days, every plan Sam and I made about how we wanted our daughter to be born went out the window. We wanted a home birth with the midwife we'd been meeting with over the course of my pregnancy.

It’s a perspective we all understand, as it’s a basic experience we’ve all had to live through if we’ve been born and grown up. No matter who you are or where you are in your Christian walk, the sentiment is easy to understand. God formed you in your mother’s womb. When no one else knew you, not even your parents, God knew you. There is nothing about you that could be hidden from the Lord. All through the standard nine months your mother was pregnant with you, she wondered: what color would her baby’s eyes be? Their hair? Would it be a boy or a girl? What would your personality be? What would you grow up to do?

This week, let’s continue on into the following verses, which are deep with vivid imagery. The Lord is our shepherd. He makes us lie down in green pastures, He leads us beside still waters. He refreshes us and leads us along paths of righteousness. When I was a kid, memorizing these verses, I pictured my Papa’s house in the mountains of New York. His house was at the top of a hill, surrounded by woods, and at the bottom of the hill was a little stream and an apple grove. Everything about it was green and beautiful to my childhood imagination.

We’ve been at this for many years: since August of 2017. Over the years, Christmas has become an ever-increasing difficult topic to unpack over and over. Each year, I worry about how I can make it different, and put it in a slightly different vein than the years before. And I’ll admit, some of our Christmas devotions are my absolute favorite; finding completely new things to make Christmas and God brand new all over again. So this year, I was concerned over how I’d be able to pull it off all over again. And then I thought: Why not take a non-Christmas passage and relate it back to the Christmas story. So, for the next few weeks, I’d like to experiment with you and see what we can discover together by taking Psalm 23– one of the most recognized and culturized passages of scripture– and see if we can view it through the lens of Jesus’ birth to see anything new.

Jesus’ birth was no accident; that’s something we’ve been really driving home over the past few weeks. His arrival was foretold in the Old Testament numerous times in psalms and songs, from prophets, and from God Himself. And since everything from his lineage, to the place and circumstances of Jesus’ birth were already in scripture, we could be sure that when it actually happened, we’d have the ability to check and prove that this birth was the arrival of the Messiah God had promised us. Without this foreshadowing, we might have accepted any liar that wanted to masquerade and exploit themselves as the promise of God.

The holidays are busy, and the busiest day of them all is Christmas Eve. Today, we have one last opportunity to wrap (or buy) those gifts, clean ourselves up, and get to whatever family gathering we’re going to. For some, this might be all on top of a full workday. To make matters even more frantic, we had one less week this year with Thanksgiving being set so far back.

n this season, we celebrate Jesus, our Savior being born in a manger in Bethlehem. Our God needed to come to this world to save us– His people– and He decided to come in the form of a baby through the virgin Mary. In this season of family and holiday excitement, it can be very easy to forget what we are truly celebrating and that is one of the most beautiful of miracles the world has ever seen.

If you’ve been reading and following Soul Deep Devotions since the beginning, then you know my testimony: I’m the girl that’s always known Jesus. I never had this grand, tragic falling away story. Even in my college years, when I was in a sorority and wasn’t actively pursuing the Lord, I wasn’t that far away. My friends still saw me as a goodie-two-shoes. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t go home with anyone for the night, and I always left the party before things got too crazy.

Hey Pops, All this season, I’ve felt so captured by this picture: a dusty, low-lit stable. Horses, maybe some cattle, all huddled in their stalls, making the occasional barnyard chatter. Somewhere in the room, a torch is burning, lighting up a little area and casting long shadows across the dirt floor and the stable walls.

Maybe it’s a little cliché, but I think this passage of the Christmas story is my favorite. Whenever I read it, I can’t help but feel such wonder for the moment. Mary, a young Nazarene girl goes from unseen and simple to the living proof of God’s amazing power and love.