There was a woman who was going through the worst time of her life. It seemed to her that all hope of happiness had now completely vanished. Husband gone. Bills piling up. Loneliness growing by the day. On her way to bed on Christmas Eve she noticed her Bible on the little red table by her chair. She had kept it there for as long as she could remember. She touched the well-worn leather cover but felt only emptiness in her heart, so she decided to put it away, out of sight.

What good is this book? she thought. It doesn't work any more. She tucked it in between blankets in her linen closet in the hall, turned out the lights and went to bed.

That night she tossed and turned as she tried to sleep. On her back. On her tummy. Fluff the pillow. Flatten it. It did not seem to matter what she did; sleep eluded her. Maybe a glass of milk, she thought. And a cookie.

She got up and walked through the house that was dark except for where the moonlight streamed in through the living room window. She looked down at her feet as the moonlight bathed her toes. They looked pretty with a fresh coat of Candy Cane Sparkle nail polish, applied just that afternoon.

The sight of her toes with sparkly red polish glistening in the light of the moon lifted her spirits. Wiggling her toes, she suddenly recalled a phrase she loved from the Bible, something about keeping her feet from falling…

Her curiosity piqued, she walked to the closet and pulled out her Bible, a book she once read every day, eagerly poring over it for words of comfort, words of hope that had felt as true as true could feel.

My Jesus, she used to say as she thought of him, the brother she had never met in person but whom she felt she knew by heart. But as her life had grown more and more difficult, that brother seemed so far away.

Funny, though, she could still picture clearly how good just the thought of spending time in the Scriptures used to make her feel. She sat down on the floor holding her Bible there in the moonlight and was transported to a time when, even during the most fearful or uncertain of times, she knew all she had to do was clutch the book close to her heart, and the messages inside would seep into her soul, soothing her and instantly returning her back to where she felt safe and secure and loved: beside "her" Jesus.

Suddenly there was a man standing beside the little red table. Without pausing to consider how impossible such a thing would be, she smiled at the stranger who somehow didn't feel like a stranger at all.

"Hello," he said in a voice that reminded her of home and cocoa and fuzzy slippers. "I've missed you," he said, coming over to sit across from her on the moonlight splashed rug.

"I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've…forgotten your name," she said, unable to recall who he was, though feeling she knew him from somewhere. He reached for the Bible in her hands and said,

"May I?" He gently turned the pages to the chapter in Luke that described the birth of Jesus. "'And laid him in a manger,'" he read aloud. "I barely remember that manger." Then grinning he added, "Well, except at Christmas time."

He stood up and walked to the fireplace. He picked up one of the plaster of paris wise men from her nativity set, something her mother had left her. As it had been when she was a girl, it was the first decoration put out and the last to be put away every Christmas.

"Everyone loves these little scenes, don't they?" he asked. "A friend of mine was always so embarrassed because her brothers used to play a game with theirs."; He took the tiny baby out of the small wooden crib and held it in his hand. "Her brothers used to leave the baby on the mantle and use the crib for a basketball hoop. They pretended the wise men were the basketball players and the shepherd was the referee."

He's talking about me! she thought. Her brothers did that! Every time they played it, she would rescue the baby Jesus and put him in her pocket for safe keeping. They used a cranberry for the ball, and every time it landed in the crib they would shout, "He shoots!! He scorres Then they would laugh their loud little brother laughter and start all over again. This went on for years until one day the tallest of the wise men fell to the hearth below and broke his neck. "I think I would have made this one with the broken neck the point guard instead of the forward," he said. Again he grinned.

He carefully returned the baby to the crib and lined up the wise men beside the manger exactly as they had been, "broken neck wise man," as he was forever known after the fall, safely standing in between the others. Then he closed her Bible and put it back on her table where it belonged and walked back to the rug and sat down beside her. She sat motionless watching him, as if the arms of Love itself were wrapped around her.

Was this a dream? One moment she was suffocating in hopelessness, feeling there was no longer any point in prayer or her Bible, and now she sat beside a stranger whose smile filled the room with hope and light and grace.

How could this be happening? she wondered to herself.

"This is happening because you really need me," he answered, hearing her unspoken thoughts. "And that Scripture you remembered earlier, the one from the Psalms, it's true you know: He really does keep our feet from falling. Unless of course you're a plaster of paris wise man."

He laughed. She laughed. And for the rest of the night, while the moon traveled across the sky, she told him all the secrets of her heart. Years of sorrow came tumbling out. He said not one word, yet she felt the touch of his forgiving and compassionate heart wash away years of pain, of hurt and fear. ; When she was finished talking, she hugged her knees to her chest and, resting her head, closed her eyes and listened to his soothing voice as he began to speak words she realized she had missed for so long.

Christmas morning came. Sun peeked in the window above her bed and she awoke with a smile; because for the first time in a long time, she was happy. But in an instant her smile faded as she realized she was not in the living room with the kind stranger any longer.

It must have been a dream...

With a heavy heart, she got out from under her warm covers and stood barefoot on the cold floor. As tears began to spill down her cheeks, she reached for a tissue in the pocket of her bathrobe lying at the foot of the bed.

But the tissue she pulled out wasn't just a crumbled tissue. It was one that had been neatly folded into a tiny square. As she unfolded it with care, she beheld the baby Jesus from her nativity set! Speechless, she held it tightly in her fist and hurried toward the living room to plug in the lights on the tree.

Christmas had come! He really was here, she thought. Now it was she who grinned.

She reached the rug where she had sat in the moonlight with her visitor, and there at her feet was he Bible, opened to the same page in the book of Luke he had read aloud from. Her three wise men were lined up on the page beside the words, "and laid him in a manger." On the opposite page with a bright red cranberry lying inside, stood the tiny wooden crib.

And handwritten in shimmering red ink at the bottom of the page were the following words:

"He shoots! He scorres!"
     Merry Christmas with Love,
          I Am Always,
          Your Jesus

"And she brought forth
her firstborn son,
and wrapped him in swaddling clothes,
and laid him in a manger."
Luke 2:7