The woman (above) is Joy Donley, someone I met years ago when we both performed at some long-forgotten Christmas program in the Twin Cities. She's adapted a short story of mine for a church service, her church, a place named Awaken, in St. Paul.
"Joy and Miracle" was published in Christianity Today years ago, when the magazine asked me for something for Christmas. It's one of several stories Baker published (again, years ago), a collection of Christmas stories titled Startling Joy (it's out of print). Just so you know I'm not making this up, some of that info you can see, just faintly, on the screen above her.
What Joy Donley is doing here is breathing life into an old story of mine, a story that has all but disappeared. Her adaptation and performance of it made it new to me, which is a bit ironic because the story itself is about breathing new life into old stuff, breathing new life into an old, old story that takes place in a shed in a Israeli town called Bethlehem.
What Joy does is perfectly beautiful. It'll cost you little more than ten minutes or so, but I'm thinking if you make a place for it somewhere in your holiday celebrations, you will be, as I was, magnificently blessed.
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