An Intimate Moment with the Savior - Christmas

Enjoy this excerpt from Ken Gire’s devotional, Intimate Moments with the Savior.

 

For the census, the royal family has to travel eighty-five miles.  Joseph walks, while Mary, nine months pregnant, rides sidesaddle on a donkey, feeling every jolt, every rut, every rock in the road.

 

The night is still when Joseph creaks open the stable door.  As he does, a chorus of barn animals makes discordant note of the intrusion.  The stench is pungent and humid, as there have not been enough hours in the day to tend the guest, let alone the livestock.  A disquieting place for a woman in the throes of childbirth.  Far from home.  Far from family.  Far from what she had expected for her firstborn. 

 

It is a relief just to get off the donkey.  She leans back against the wall, her feet swollen, back aching, contractions growing stronger and closer together.

 

Joseph’s eyes dart around the stable.  Not a minute to lose.  Quickly.  A feeding trough would have to make for a crib.  Hay would serve as a mattress.  Blankets?  Blankets? Ah, his robe.  That would do.  A gripping contraction doubles Mary over and sends him racing for a bucket of water.

 

A scream from Mary knifes through the calm of that silent night.  Joseph returns, breathless, water sloshing from the wooden bucket. 

 

Joseph places a garment beneath her, and with a final push and a long sigh her labor is over.

 

The Messiah has arrived.

 

The Son of the Most High God umbilically tied to a lowly Jewish girl.

 

The baby chokes and coughs.  Joseph instinctively turns him over and clears his throat.  Then he cries.  Mary reaches for the shivering baby, lays him on her chest, and his helpless cries subside. 

 

Deity nursing from a young maiden’s breast.  Could anything be more puzzling – or more profound?

 

She looks up at Joseph, and through a watery veil, their souls touch.  He crowds close, cheek to cheek with his betrothed.  Together they stare in awe at the baby Jesus, whose heavy eyelids begin to close.  It has been a long journey.  The King is tired.

 

And so, with barely a ripple of notice, God stepped into the warm lake of humanity.  Without protocol and without pretension.

 

Where you would have expected heads of state, there were only donkeys, a few haltered cows, a nervous ball of sheep, a tethered camel, and a furtive scurry of curious barn mice.

 

Except for Joseph, there was no one to share Mary’s pain.  Or her joy.  Yes, there were angels announcing the Savior’s arrival – but only to a band of blue-collar shepherds.  And yes, a magnificent star shone in the sky to mark his birthplace – but only three foreigners bothered to look up and follow it. 

 

Thus, in the little town of Bethlehem… that one silent night… the royal birth of God’s son tiptoed quietly by… as the world slept. 

 

Merry Christmas!