Last week on my morning walk on Signal Hill, I stopped dead.
Sunbreak.
Not just any sunbreak—shafts of light punching through pewter clouds, spotlighting houses and trees. For a moment the whole gray world transformed. It made me think of that line in Silent Night: Glories stream from heaven afar. Through the gloom, through the ordinary gray of December, God’s light still streams in.
That’s what happened that first Christmas night. The shepherds were going about their regular work—night shift, watching flocks, when suddenly the sky split open. Glory. Streaming from heaven. Bathing the shepherds in transcendent love as the angels sing to them.
And here’s what I love: when God wants to change the world, it isn’t through an army to make people capitulate, but a choir to inspire. Not through domination but through a dependent baby. Not force but invitation, that’s God’s way.
The Shepherds Nobody Wanted
Close your eyes and picture them on that hill, in that glory. How many shepherds to you see? The Bible doesn’t say how many shepherds showed up that night. Just “certain shepherds.” I’ve always wondered about that word—certain. Were there uncertain shepherds? Maybe they were certain that God was uninterested in their plights. Certain God was aloof, distant, too busy with important people to bother with them. But then the glory comes streaming in with the angelic announcement and the heavenly host singing, and everything they were certain about gets upended.
They race toward Bethlehem to check it out.
Now, I’m imagining how the conversation might have gone when they burst into that stable. Picture Mary, hours after giving birth in a barn, exhausted, probably still in shock that she’s holding God-made-flesh in her arms. She looks up and sees these men in the doorway.
“Uh, who are you? What are you doing here?”
One of them speaks for the group, breathless. “Yeah, okay, you’re not going to believe this. We were tending our flocks when this angel appears—like, appears, blazing—and says there’s good news. Unto us a child has been born, a savior given. The way he said ‘unto you’ sounded so personal, we had to come.”
Mary shifts the baby, winces, levels her eyes at them. “Unto you? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? All my friends say cruel things about me. I just traveled ninety-six miles on a donkey—in labor—only to give birth in a stable that smells like livestock and disappointment. And unto you a child has been born?”
“Hey, don’t blame us. Take it up with the angels who sent us.”
“An angel sent you?” Mary’s voice rises. “The angel couldn’t have sent someone useful? Like a midwife? A doula? My mother, to tell me what was normal? The angel didn’t think to visit the innkeeper, persuade him to give us a room? But instead, he sent you.”
The shepherds shuffle their feet. They’re used to this. People looking down their noses, stepping aside when they walk by, refusing their testimony in court because everyone knows shepherds are suspect—rogues, ruffians, repugnant to respectable society.
But that was exactly the point.
That’s why the angels went to them first. It was God’s sign that with Jesus, things are different. That even the lowest of the low, even people who had earned bad reputations, were included in this. Unto them. Unto you. Unto us.
As far as we know, Mary didn’t tear into them. She received them. She got it. She knew something bigger was at work here, something more important than her exhaustion or her wounded pride. Christmas has a way of doing that—inspiring us to give people a pass, to go easier on them, to ease up on the judgment. It reminds us that God’s mercy is for everyone, not just those who have their acts together. It’s about peace and goodwill toward all, sensing that something bigger is at play than our knee-jerk reactions.
When we calm ourselves and do not react, as Mary did, pondering these things in her heart, we open a space for the Christmas light to break in.
Glory Still Streams
That sunbreak on my morning walk? I started seeing them everywhere after that. Once you notice light breaking through, you can’t stop seeing it.
Look over there. The light catches six men at the diner on 4th Street, stuffing bills into an envelope for their server who refills their coffee for two hours every Monday while they untangle the world’s problems.
Look over there. Something like glory illuminates a woman in her kitchen, making a casserole for someone she’s never met because she heard they’re going through chemo and could use help.
Look over there. The light blazes on a mother and her seventeen-year-old son opening a Christmas gift from our church—a tiny ice cube maker, the kind that sits on your counter.
I’ll be honest—when I saw that on the gift request list, I judged. Hard. An ice maker? How frivolous. What a waste of counter space. What a weird ask.
Then John Porhorsky delivered the gifts and told me their story. The mother has lupus. The son has leukemia—he is seventeen years old, and he’s been hospitalized countless times in his young life. They share a house and a kitchen with several other families because that’s what they can afford. To stay hydrated, the son likes to suck on ice cubes, but he’d prefer not to get them from the community freezer, where who knows who has touched them.
The light broke through. Reminded me to be less judgmental. You never know what someone is going through. You never know what small thing might be a lifeline. Our job in this world is to help the light break in.
The light breaks through. That’s Christmas. Not just a story about long ago but reminders right now, today, that there’s still good in the world, God working through ordinary people to make things better.
When Clouds Hang Heavy
Maybe you’re in a time when it feels like clouds are hanging over you without a break in sight.
Hang on.
The light is still there even when you can’t see it yet. Clouds break. Glory breaks through. Maybe not today, maybe not this week, but it breaks through. The feeling of forgiveness when you didn’t think you could forgive. Acceptance when you’ve felt nothing but judgment. Welcome when you’ve felt like an outsider—like those certain shepherds who became certain that they were included too.
The Christmas Reset
We need these yearly reminders to give us hope and help us reset. It’s not so much about shepherds and magi and stars as it is about God’s intervention in the world to make things better through what Jesus talked about and modeled: empathy, forgiveness, grace.
Like those certain shepherds, I too am certain.
I’m certain that peace and goodwill aren’t just nice ideas—they’re the architecture of a better world, shaping how we treat each other, how we build our communities, how we see ourselves. I’m certain the path to happiness runs through giving, not getting—through making a difference, not making a fortune. I’m certain that truth-telling, even costly truth-telling, beats drowning in a sea of lies.
Silent Night suggests the shepherds saw radiant beams from Jesus’ holy face. I love that image. Not halos and ethereal glow, but holiness streaming from one human being to another, from face to face, from person to person. That’s the Christmas message right there.
When we see the holy in each other, when we catch those radiant beams, we remember: God is with us. Not against us. Not apart from us. Not distant or aloof. But with us, for us, despite everything—the mess, the failures, the judgment, the exhaustion. God is with us because God believes it can be better. We can be better.
So tonight, as you leave this place and step back into your lives, look for the sunbreaks. Watch for glory streaming through the gray. The light is still there. It breaks through in a casserole delivered. In money stuffed in an envelope. In a tiny ice maker that says I see you, I see what you need.
It breaks through in the friend who calls when you’re alone. In the stranger who smiles at you in the grocery store. In the moment you choose not to react, but to ponder, to make space for something holy to happen.
It breaks through in you.
From those uncertain shepherds to this uncertain world, the message remains certain: unto you, unto us, unto all—the light breaks in.
Let the choirs sing.
Let them inspire.
Merry Christmas.