A Simple Christmas Read Free

when the actual version probably resembled something closer to Jerry Springer!
    I’m not being disrespectful toward the birth of God’s son. In fact, as strange as it is, that’s the way the whole thing was planned. When God decided to show up in person, He did it in a way that totally defied conventional wisdom. After all, He was the “King,” and we are used to kings showing up wearing some fancy clothes and surrounded by an army, a band with lots of loud brass horns, and an enormous number of attendants to take care of everything from booking the hotels to tipping the baggage handlers to even tasting the food. But the scene of the original Christmas didn’t follow this script—not even close.
    The story starts with a fairly simple fourteen-year-old girl named Mary and a scraggly teenage boy named Joseph. Mary and Joseph led pretty quiet lives, and neither of them was all that big a deal in their little hometown of Nazareth, which itself was unimportant at that time.
    Joseph was Mary’s boyfriend. There was nothing unusual about a teenager having a boyfriend, but Mary also had a secret: She had a baby inside her, and she wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer. It wasn’t as common back then as it is now for a young, unwed girl to become a mother, but it wasn’t unheard of. But Mary also had another secret that was unheard of. She adamantly insisted she had never had sex with anyone, including Joseph. That was hard for her parents, or anyone else, for that matter, to believe. The only person who believed Mary when she said she and Joseph had never slept together was Joseph himself. But he was still having a very hard time accepting the idea that Mary really hadn’t been with anyone else. He wanted to believe she was telling the truth because he didn’t want to have to confront the pain of knowing that the girl he hoped to marry one day had been unfaithful to him even before they had exchanged their vows.
    Although there was speculation over who the father of Mary’s child was, there was no doubt that this young girl was pregnant. It was humiliating to her and to her family to have people talk behind their backs and gossip about who had gotten Mary pregnant.
    Mary and Joseph had discussed marriage, but now a baby would be involved from the beginning, and Joseph would have to accept that it wasn’t his. What’s worse, Mary not only was claiming that she hadn’t been with another man but was actually insistent that an angel had come to her from heaven and announced that she would be having God’s child. The young man demonstrated an amazing love for this girl, having to actually believe either that she was talking to angels and having God’s child or that she was a very mentally disturbed person, but because he loved her so much he was willing to accept her delusional tendencies.
    Several months into Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph was summoned to the town of Bethlehem, where he had been born, to register for a census that King Herod wanted done. It was clearly a typical government deal—making the entire population travel back to the city of their birth rather than just sending a few census takers to the communities to ask the questions. I would be more critical of such an absurd policy, but today, two thousand years later, the government still does things that are just as inexplicable, like having elderly women take off their shoes and get virtually strip-searched at an airport before getting on a plane to go see their grandkids.
    For Mary and Joseph, this meant a trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem; the two towns were about eighty miles apart, but the most popular route took a longer way bypassing Samaria, making it about a week’s journey. This sort of trip—twenty miles or more a day on a donkey or walking over rugged and rocky terrain—was very dangerous for a pregnant girl, especially when there were no hospitals on the way. I’m