The Manger Was a Safe House
This Christmas, discover the tactical rescue hidden within the silent night
It is the evening of December 23rd. The house grows quiet, and we are ready for “heavenly peace.”
We imagine the first Christmas was hushed and still.
But the first Christmas was a tactical nightmare.
The men history calls Magi were Persian intelligence officers crossing a hostile border. Their mission was not a pilgrimage. It was an extraction. They were racing to locate a high-value target before a government death squad closed the net.
This scene from The Magi: Extraction Protocol drops you into the breach. Ardnon, the lead operative, is standing outside a locked door in Bethlehem. Herod’s cavalry is four hundred yards out and closing fast. He has to get inside, deliver the funding, and get the family underground before the door gets kicked in by the wrong people.
THE BREACH
Bethlehem Sector. 7 B.C.
“We have ten minutes,” Ardnon said. “Maybe less.”
The door was rough-hewn olive wood, barred from the inside. Ardnon didn’t waste time knocking. He stepped back, pivoted, and drove the heel of his boot into the wood just below the lock mechanism.
The bar gave way with a wet crack and the door banged hard against the stone wall.
Ardnon surged into the room.
The air inside was warm, thick with the smell of woodsmoke, old wool, and the metallic scent of fear.
Joseph was already moving. He didn’t freeze. He lunged for a carpenter’s adze leaning against the hearth, his grip white-knuckled on the handle as he swung it up in a desperate, lethal arc aimed at Ardnon’s head.
“We are not your enemy!” Ardnon barked in rough Aramaic, holding his hands up but keeping his posture coiled.
“Herod knows,” he said, his voice hard and fast. “His scouts are on the ridge. You have five minutes.”
Joseph hesitated, his chest heaving, and slowly lowered the adze.
Ardnon didn’t wait for permission. He swung the heavy cedar chest off his shoulder and dropped it onto the low wooden eating table. Thud. The sound was heavy, dull, and final.
He snapped the brass latch and threw the lid back, spilling gold into the firelight.
Heavy Persian coinage and raw bullion, stamped with the seals of forgotten empires, caught the light and held it. The gold glowed with a cold brilliance that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.
“Operational funding,” Ardnon said, shoving the chest toward the carpenter. “For bribes. For passage. For silence.”
“Who are you?” Joseph whispered.
“The men who just made you the richest fugitives in Judea,” Gaspar called from the window, his eyes still locked on the road outside. “Pack. Now.”
Ardnon reached into his deep sleeves and pulled out two leather pouches. “Frankincense,” he said, tossing the first one to Joseph. “High-grade resin. It is currency anywhere in the empire. Sell it in small amounts so it leaves no paper trail.”
He tossed the second pouch toward the mother, Mary. “Myrrh. Medicinal. Antiseptic. Or for burial, if the road goes bad.”
Mary caught the pouch against her chest and moved to shove it into the sack, but the drawstring was loose. The child, Yeshua, reached out from her arms.
It was a toddler’s reflex, grasping at the new object. His small fingers brushed the open neck of the leather pouch, touching the dark, sticky resin inside. A single tear of the substance clung to his skin.
The scent wafted up instantly. Sharp, balsamic, and bitter. It cut through the smell of woodsmoke. It was the smell of preservation and death, clinging to the hand of a child barely old enough to walk.
Ardnon watched the child stare at the resin on his finger.
Then the child looked up.
He wasn’t looking at his mother. He wasn’t looking at the gold. He was looking at Ardnon.
Ardnon met the gaze. For a fraction of a second, the room stilled. The shouting, the adrenaline, the thudding of hooves in the distance. It all receded into a dull hum.
The child’s eyes were dark, reflecting the dancing firelight. But there was no fear in them. There was no confusion. It was not the ancient look of a sage. It was the sovereign look of a maker beholding his tool.
In that instant, Ardnon did not see a child who would become a king. He saw the King, who had, for a time, become a child.
The absolute, unassailable identity that gazed back at him had never been formed. It had merely arrived.
The child blinked. The moment shattered.
“Contact,” Gaspar hissed from the window. “Three hundred yards. They are dismounting. I see torches.”
Ardnon turned back to Joseph.
“Go,” he ordered. “Out the back. Into the ravine.”
THE MATH OF GRACE
This story can handle the weight of the real world because it happened in the real world. The gold bought the silence. The frankincense bought the passage. The myrrh presaged the end.
The gritty history is why the peace is real. It wasn’t a greeting card. It was a rescue mission. And that mission succeeded.
In these quiet nights ahead, as you feel that hard-won peace settle in, remember its price.
If you want the full mission report, the escape to Egypt, the safe houses, and the sixteen lives it cost to keep the door open, the ebook is just $0.99.
Or, download the PDF version of The Magi and King David for free right here.
They’re my Christmas gift to you. A chance to see the heart of our story through a lens of danger, duty, and divine strategy.
I’m hustling to get one more article out tomorrow. A ghost story, in a sense, for Christmas Eve.
If you’d like to support my work directly, skipping Amazon, I would be oh so grateful for a coffee or two.
Wishing you a deeply peaceful Christmas, surrounded by that profound, rescuing love.
<3 EKO
Merry Christmas.
I love you.
I love too. Bought the books. Press more.
Steve Hoffman