Happy Christmas
There always seems to me to be two stories going on at the same time in the nativity story. There is the one where lots of spectacular things happen – angels appearing and wise men following stars and prophecies being fulfilled etc.
But then there is the simple ordinary story that no one would bother with normally. The story of a young woman from nowhere who is pregnant before she gets married (big deal); travelling to a place for registration because the government wants to tax them (that’s a new story, a government wanting to tax people – boring); she then has her child in a stable (slightly more interesting but not much (how many funny stories are there of children born in strange places – I heard of a better one the other day with a baby born in a toilet!).
Yet, its the thing that brings these two stories together that counts. The baby.
The baby is the one who the angels sing about and prophets write about and yet its the baby who is born in a very boring way. It’s this baby who comes to change the dull and ordinary into something wonderful and meaningful.
So although we may be very ordinary people with nothing remarkable in our own story that doesn’t matter because God is born into just the kind of life that we live. No great armies or palaces or record deals or Simon Cowel, etc just ordinary parents in a boring place. Yet this is the same one that the angels sing about. This is the life that changes the world.
I am grateful every day that it was into a life just like mine that God chose to be born into. This is what makes it the greatest story ever told.