In a week... & Hope

A week from now we will be coming home from 5th Christmas get-together (with one more still to come.) We will be exhausted and full. Our kids will be sleepy & wound up all at the same time. We will come in to our house strewn with new toys and candy. And it will be over. The season that we anticipate all year long. It will have passed on by. The week following I will take down our tree and pack up our stockings. The kids will help me put Baby Jesus and the rest of the Nativity scene back in it's box. I will slowly rid the house of all the goodies we have enjoyed lately (either by inhaling them all as quickly as I can, tossing them in a bag for my students or trashing them.) After a week of rest, we will get back to the crazy that is life....without the fun of the Christmas season. I must admit that I'm dreading it already. I'm silently willing this week to S-L-O-W down. Just a bit. So I can just soak it all in. So I can enjoy the smiles on their faces. The pure magic of it all. The magic it still is for me.

Every Christmas morning at my granny's before breakfast someone reads Luke 2. I know the words almost by heart. But I love to hear it read. It's like light to my soul. Just hearing those words. The promise that God gave to this world. I love to hear how Mary and Joseph headed to Bethlehem for the census. How they were turned away everywhere they went. How they ended up in a barn. A barn. Now I'm outdoorsy...in the sense that I like to go to the pool and the beach and on the occasional hike. But I'm not really a "barn girl". My family has a barn (or two.) And currently they keep animals in them (for years it was mostly storage space.) And to be perfectly honest...I don't go in them much. Not much for the general barn smell. I don't even really like my basement. I cannot imagine giving birth in a barn. And then shepherds came. Random (to Mary & Joseph at least) shepherds. Now I imagine that Mary & Joseph weren't all that surprised to see shepherds. I'd say the shock of this baby and all that He encompassed was beginning to be more common to them. They weren't surprised that God would send shepherds. After all, they'd been talking to angels. I love to hear about the shepherds though. Cause shepherds weren't high class citizens. They probably hadn't showered in days. They weren't high and mighty in their society. They were ordinary joes. And if angels came to ordinary joes, there's hope for me, right? Hope for us all.