Hi everybody. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. It's a special week out and about.

It's a bad one to be, about to be Christmas. For some of us, thanks for spending your time

with us this week. I've been thinking a lot about the Christmas story and how it has always

been so deeply important to me. So much so that once when Craig and I were married and Chase was a

baby, I volunteered our entire family to be married, Jesus and Joseph at our church Christmas

evenativity play. Just because I just wanted to be closer and closer to the story, I just needed to

crawl inside the story somehow and so we we volunteered. I volunteered for Craig, such a good

sport in his robe and sandals and beard in front of all of his church buddies. He's such a believable

Joseph though, right? Like having just found himself in the center of a confusing insta family

with a young wife completely convinced that her new baby boy was God himself.

My life and my understanding of the Jesus stories has changed so much over the past two decades,

but those stories are still equally precious to me and maybe more precious to me since I started

understanding Bible stories and all religious stories really not as historical reports that reveal

facts about our shared world, but as literary works that reveal truth about our shared humanity.

And my favorite way to hear the Christmas story ever is from Linus in Charlie Brown Christmas

show. Oh my God, when he stands up in that spotlight and he holds his little blanky and he tells

that story, oh my God, that one slays me but every every time I hear it no matter who is telling it,

I'm just all goosebumps and chills and tenderness and truth. Because how I understand the story is

this. So long ago, a whole culture of people was suffering oppressed by power and collective deep

pain and they had been hurting for so long, but they still yearned they had this deep

collective yearning because in their bones they knew there was a promise in the air, some kind of

promise in the air of hope, of comfort, of justice, of freedom, of peace, of saving. Right? And

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