Christmas Came Early For Me!

Do you remember the nativity scene I was wishing for a few posts back? Well bless my husband and my kids(!) they wanted me to have it before Christmas! They thought it was so unfair to open it on Christmas, only to have to pack it up to wait for next year!

I have never really wanted a nativity scene. I always thought they took up too much space in storage and when it's set up, well, I gotta dust the thing!

I remember getting one for my mom one Christmas and she loved it! She loved the beautiful colors that give it that eastern world flair and the intricate details of the painted faces. The angel looks so glorious and the wise men look...well...wise!

Though it never really spoke to me like it did to my mom, I do remember gazing at it sometimes in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, wondering, 'what was it like?' The pageantry of the scene seemed a little off to me, but like stained glass windows in a church, deep red poppies at Remembrance Day or artful renders of the cross at Easter, it pays homage...

Homage to the first, most life-altering events of mankind.

My Nativity scene looks nothing like my mothers. Mine is simple. White and grey. There are no faces. The star is rust colored. There are no fancy colorful fabrics on the backs of the animals. I love it. It symbolizes what I think it would have been like.

On that dark night, few would have even heard that the young couple that had to stay in the stable that night had given birth to a boy. Even lesser known, would have been the fact that he was not just an ordinary boy. He was a king.

If you would have been there, you would have had to look pretty hard to figure out the king-ness of it all.

As you sat in the tavern near the inn, ordering a pint of ale to warm you to your toes, you might have overheard someone talking about it, nodded, glad mom and babe are doing fine. But if you didn't know about the shepherds in the fields, the angels, the magi running around and studying stars to find him, you would have missed the whole thing.

It's true still today - if you don't look deeper into God's Word, you will miss it. Though you've seen the book on store shelves, knowing it's existance, you will miss the most simple, life-altering truth of you could ever know.