I have a nineteen-month-old daughter who decided she didn’t want to sit in her high chair for dinner last night. She threw a fit. My Australian friends refer to this as “chucking a wobbly,” and somehow that seems a better description.

I forced her body, which she had stiffened straight as a board, into the chair only to watch her throw the food we’d lovingly placed before her all over the floor. She wasn’t having it. In fact, she didn’t stop crying until I took her out of the chair and set her on my lap, and that’s how we both ate dinner last night.

I’m not in the habit of relishing my daughter’s cries, and last night was no different. But when I place last night’s experience next to the unspeakable events of Newtown, Connecticut, it doesn’t take long for me to see my daughter’s cries as pure gifts of heaven.

At church recently I was reminded of another, strangely parallel tragedy—what’s known historically as the Slaughter of the Innocents, when Herod the Great preempted his ouster by ordering the execution of all the young boys in Bethlehem. He had heard from men in the know about the birth of a baby who one day would be king of the Jews. “King of the Jews” was Herod’s title, and he wasn’t about to give it up.

That night the cries of children went silent as Roman soldiers swiftly carried out their orders.

Earlier a young couple had been warned by a strange apparition to flee. “Go to Egypt,” the voice said. Joseph and Mary sneak away with their infant son in the dead of night, trudging across the desert as fast as their legs could carry them.

And somewhere along the way, it stands to reason, the baby would have been hungry. He would have moaned and grunted and wrenched in search of Mother’s milk. And when it didn’t come fast enough, this child would have thrown his head back and cried.

Even as Herod silenced the cries of hundreds if not thousands of young boys, in a far off land a baby cried.

Even as those beautiful children in Newtown lost their lives so senselessly, in a far off land a baby cried.

Even as the powers of this world try their damnedest to scare us into weakness and submission, in a far off land a baby cried.

No matter how bad it gets, no matter how unjust, how oppressive, how murderous, how unfair, how painful it gets, this cry reminds us that good wins in the end.

Merry Christmas.