During Christmas we tend to avoid the messy. It's hard to face ugly and hard things straight on, and Christmas doesn't feel like the right time to do it.
But the ugly and the messy is woven into the story of our Savior and how He was delivered to us.
The genealogy of Jesus was specifically crafted in Matthew 1 to move us into the mystery of how God chooses and uses the hidden and dark moments of our lives to bring salvation. Not in spite of the wrong, but because of it.
This Christmas we will be looking at the 4 women mentioned in the family tree of Jesus Christ: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.
They may not have known much about what God was doing in their messy lives, but the Savior was in the shadows, keeping watch above His own.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record          
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;          
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—        
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,  
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."  
James Russell Lowell