This Christmas, while we sing “Joy to the World,” there are believers whispering psalms into the night so quietly they will not be found. There are little boys asking if Herod still lives. There are girls named Rachel crying for brothers who are no more. And the road out of Bethlehem continues…But the promise remains: Herod dies. Christ lives. 

The wind snapped through the sycamores near Table Rock Lake and carried the scent of cedar bark and wet limestone down the hollow. I stepped out of the truck into the hush of a winter night, gravel crackling underfoot, and saw our church glowing like a lantern in the dark. Christmas in these hills always feels older than it is. The stars above seem lower. The land breathes slower. Smoke rises in ribbons from stone chimneys. Even the dogs keep quiet. The whole ridge waits.

Across the ocean, under a different sky, believers in Nigeria were not waiting. They were running. A fire swallowed their church. A mother held her child and prayed they wouldn’t be found. A pastor was taken. Grass bent beneath their bodies as they lay still in a field. No warning. Just darkness. Just the sudden closeness of evil.

And I thought of Matthew’s Gospel. Of Joseph waking to a dream. Of Bethlehem, breathing like a cradle just before the scream.

The Christ Child entered a world where soldiers kicked down doors.

Where parents fled in the night and where rulers hunted babies.

The wise men had just vanished over the ridge, their camels still casting shadows behind them. Frankincense lingered in the rafters. Myrrh glinted in a bowl. The toddler, barefoot, walking now, slept in the next room.

Joseph was tired. The day’s work still on his hands. And then the dream.

“Get up. Take the child and His mother. Go now. Herod will hunt Him.”

The road to Egypt doesn’t wind like a lullaby. It cuts through open land, dry and exposed. Joseph lifted the boy. Mary wrapped her shawl tighter. They didn’t wake the neighbors. They didn’t wait for dawn.

They fled.

I picture the baby pressed against Mary’s chest. Joseph watching every movement in the dark. A wind out of the east raising dust around their feet. The sound of sandals. A donkey braying behind them. The long silence between village lights.

And I see the same wind brushing through dry grass in Africa.

A child sleeping in the crook of a mother’s elbow.

A pastor leading his family through the brush.

Christmas is not soft.

The scent of pine candles and pageants is a covering. Beneath it: threat, hunger, power, flight.

The Son of God grew up beneath a sky that could betray Him.

He knew the cold of foreign soil.

He learned the sound of footsteps coming too close.

He entered trouble, not from a distance, but face to face. He stepped beneath the sword. He walked roads where men die.

Herod raged in blood. He waited. Then he realized the wise men had slipped away. He cursed. He paced. He issued orders. The soldiers spread out.

Bethlehem’s houses shook with screams.

The mothers held their sons and begged.

Children were pulled from sleep into horror.

It happened. Matthew says Rachel wept. She still does.

You can hear her, if you listen closely enough—

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