A Simple Christmas Read Free Page A

sure this didn’t help Joseph believe Mary’s story that she was having God’s child, because wouldn’t God want to do everything possible to make sure that the mother of His child was safe and that His child would be born in a nice, clean, stable place? Instead, it was as if everything that could go wrong did: Young girl gets pregnant, can’t really explain who the father is, and is forced to make a long journey with a teenage boy so he can carry out some idiotic government mandate. This was bad enough, but then, to add insult to injury, once the couple arrived at their destination, got counted by the government, and started to head back home, she went into labor.
    It’s not like there was a stretch of Marriotts along the freeway from Bethlehem to Nazareth. Of course, there were no freeways, either. Back then people would often rent out some space in their homes to be used as inns for travelers who needed a place to stay. But because of the census, there were more people traveling than usual, so all the extra rooms were filled. The couple was getting pretty desperate when a local resident, who felt sorry for these two young teenagers, offered to let them camp out in his barn for the night. The barn was nothing like the red wooden ones we see in the cornfields of Iowa today. In fact, it was actually a stone cave, since it was fairly typical in that day to use natural grottoes as shelters for animals.
    Throughout history, this “innkeeper,” as he has been described, has been vilified for “having no room in the inn” and forcing a frightened teenage mother to give birth to the son of God in such an uncomfortable, dirty place. But this is unfair to him. He couldn’t give what he didn’t have (a vacant room), but he gave what he did have and appears to have done so willingly and joyfully. We can’t blame him for the lack of space, but we can certainly credit him for trying to make the best of a bad situation. At least he gave what he had; many of us have far more than an animal shelter but don’t even offer that to God. We act with an air of indignation that we’d certainly make the comfort of Jesus a higher priority, but would we? Jesus has never expected us to give Him what we wished we had, but rather has always tested to see if we would simply give from what we did have.
    Have you ever said, “If I had a million dollars, I’d give God half ”? Get over it. God knows you don’t have a million dollars, and if he really wanted you to have it, he’d probably give it to you. But you do have something —probably more than you think—so use what you have .
    It’s not known whether the innkeeper at the Bethlehem “Barnyard Inn” provided any assistance to the young couple other than the space, but it seems evident that, no matter what he did, it still wasn’t the best of circumstances for a birth. Instead of a nice birthing room with soft music and sterile walls and floors, Joseph and Mary had a cave full of barnyard animals. Instead of nurses and doctors with pristine hospital gowns and masks, the most assistance the couple could’ve hoped to receive would’ve been from some local woman who might have overheard the screams of the scared teenage girl, and most likely the screams of her equally scared teenage boyfriend. Sheep, goats, and other livestock had probably been the only previous occupants of that little cave, and we can only imagine the odor and filth that likely greeted Jesus when He chose to arrive on earth as a human being for the first time. The anxiety of being away from her own mother and family would have been traumatic enough for Mary, but I can only imagine the sheer terror she felt as the intense pain of labor set in and she had no one nearby to offer Lamaze coaching, encouragement, or words of experience, much less a saddle block or an epidural.
    We always see the sanitized version of the birth of