The Shepherds

The older I get, the more excited I become when I read about Jesus being born. I try to imagine the details when I read them as if I am there.  Transform into that place of Bethlehem, smell the donkeys and think about how Mary felt.

I  put myself inside the shepherds shoes this year...imagining how I would have felt to be in their situation.  Their lifestyle was to hang out outside at night and look after their flocks.  Then an angel came out of nowhere and totally freaked them out.  But it told them that they shouldn't be afraid, Jesus was going to be born and that was amazing news.  

I love that the angel appeared to shepherds because shepherds probably smelled bad, were more of in the lower class grouping at that time, and hung out with animals constantly. But that is who the angel chose to appear to and reveal this crazy news. 

The best part is when the shepherds go and find Jesus. I bet they were amazed, maybe amazed that God had chosen to use them in such a big way to spread the news of Jesus being born. They were a giant part of the story. And just in case they thought they were loosing their minds when they saw an angel, they got to go see Jesus for themselves and it says that they were "glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told." (Luke 2:20)

I think that often we underestimate God, because we don't believe that he notices us. We feel like we are in too bad of a place, too disobedient or lazy for him to want to enter into our lives. But the story of the shepherds is just like God's character. Choosing the lowly things of the world to shame what is up high.  It's who he is and it's why Jesus makes sense.  It makes me excited to think about the shepherds being the message deliverers to so many, the ones who got to be eyewitnesses for not only Jesus but an angel delivering a personal message from God to them.

This Christmas seemed a little sad because I was not with my normal family crowd thanks to Covid. But it was a great reminder that Christmas is not about creating perfect family moments. Even those fall short. It's about closing your eyes and pretending you're a shepherd, remembering that Jesus being born really happened and what if you would have seen that angel. It's about the story being real and knowing it, then getting excited about it. Christmas is a reverent time that is not to be spoiled by consumerism, distraction, exhaustion...no matter what we tend to make it, we can't change what it is and what happened, and that is good news!