We must be willing and prepared to dance with joy when liberation arrives.

Everything is about to change. And it already has. It will be. It was. It is. The dawn you eagerly await to end the long, cold darkness is already full sun far off in the east. Yet even after light’s return spring is months away. Thirty long years pass after His birth before the Messiah comes.

Tell me the story of my birth, and help me understand how you were changed the day I entered the world. Help me know love, deep in my bones.

I’m not the same person who stood in that tattoo parlor eleven years ago. Still, I don’t for a minute regret being permanently marked with this snapshot in time, of my wounds and my hope.