To all Boilers, friends, family, followers, and visitors:
May peace and the joys of the seasons fill your home for a celebration of life, love, and family....for those who are traveling, may the light of the Spirit guide your way and provide you a safe and wonderful journey....and for those in need or with a heavy heart.....may you find comfort and solace and may your burdens be lightened.....
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May all that is beautiful, meaningful, and brings you joy be yours this holiday season and throughout the coming year. "
Merry Christmas to one and all!
This was written over 60 years ago and one of the more poignant displays of tying historic scripture and context to a shared understanding for all that I can recall.
WARNING it could take 2 minutes to read?
"Joseph was full of expectancy as he entered the city of his family and was quite convinced that he would have no difficulty in finding lodgings for Mary, particularly on account of her condition. Joseph went from house to house only to find each one crowded. He searched in vain for a place where He, to Whom heaven and earth belonged, might be born. Could it be that the Creator would no find a home in creation? Up a steep hill Joseph climbed to a fain light which swung on a rope across a doorway. This would be the village inn. There, above all other places, he would surely find shelter. There was room in the inn for the soldiers of Rome who had brutally subjugated the Jewish people; there was room for the daughters of the rich merchants of the East; there was room for those clothed in soft garments, who lived in the houses of the king in fact, there was room for anyone who had a coin to give the innkeeper; but there was no room for Him Who came to be the Inn of every homeless heart in the world.
When finally the scrolls of history are completed down to the last words in time, the saddest line of all will be: “There was no room in the inn.”
Out to the hillside to a stable cave, where shepherds sometimes drove their flocks in time of storm, Joseph and Mary went at last for shelter. There, in a place of peace in the lonely abandonment of a cold windswept cave; there, under the floor of the world, He Who is born without a mother in heaven, is born without a father on earth.
Of every other child that is born into the world, friends can say that it resembles his mother. This was the first instance in time that anyone could say that the mother resembled the Child. This is the beautiful paradox of the Child Who made His mother; the mother too, was only a child. It was also the first time in the history of this world that anyone could ever think of heaven as being anywhere else than “somewhere up there” when the Child was in her arms Mary now looked down to Heaven.
In the filthiest place in the world, a stable, Purity was born. He Who was later to be slaughtered by men acting as beasts, was born among beasts. He, Who would call Himself the “living Bread descended from Heaven,” was laid in a manger, literally, a place to eat. Centuries before, the Jews had worshiped the golden calf, and the Greeks, the ass. Men bowed down before them as before God The ox and the ass now were present to make their innocent reparation, bowing down before their God.
There was no room in the inn, but there was room in the stable. The inn is the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But the stable is a place for the outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten. The world might have expected the Son of God to be born—if He was to be born at all— in an inn. A stable would be the last place in the world where one would have looked for Him.
Divinity is always where one least expects to find it. No worldly mind would ever have suspected that He Who could make the sun warm the earth would one day have need of an ox and an ass to warm Him with their breath; that He Who, in the language of Scriptures, could stop the turning about of Arcturus would have His birthplace dictated by an imperial census; that He Who clothed the fields with grass, would Himself be naked; that He, from Whose hands came planets and worlds, would one day have tiny arms that were not long enough to touch the huge heads of the cattle; that the feet which trod the everlasting hills would one day be too weak to walk; that the Eternal Word would be dumb that Omnipotence would be wrapped in swaddling clothes; that Salvation would lie in a manger; that the bird which built the nest would be hatched therein—no one would ever have suspected that God coming to this earth would ever be so helpless. And that is precisely why so many miss Him.
Divinity is always where one least expects to find it."
