getting ready

      When I was little and all the grownups were getting ready for Christmas, an elderly priest with kind eyes told me to get ready, too. “Your heart is like the stable where the Christ Child was born,” he said. “Put clean straw in it.”

"O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light, wrapped in night's mantle, stole into a manger . . . furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have a better lodging. . . ." George Herbert

“Create in me a clean heart, O God. . . .” Psalm 51:10