What if the animals understood?

Here's a pretty cool quote I used last Sunday. Barrie Shepherd, in his book, Faces Around the Manger, imagines what would it would be like if the sheep and donkeys themselves could understand the significance of Jesus’ birth.

“Of all the witnesses around the holy manger perhaps it was the animals that saw best what lay ahead. For they had paced the aching roads, slept in the wet and hungry fields, known the sharp sting of sticks and thorns and curses, … the tendency of man to use and then discard rather than meet and pay the debt of gratitude. For them the future also held the knacker’s rope, the flayer’s blade, the tearing of their bodies for the sparing of a race. In the shadows of the stable, might it be his warmest welcome lay within their quiet comprehending gaze?”