Disappointment revisited

Some years (maybe every year) the Christmas season seems to set us up for disappointment. Did I post something similar last year?

One pre-Christmas season, when the kids were little, for some reason I got thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus and I started listing all the disappointments she must have faced that first Christmas when her baby was born. My list ran page after page after page.

Maybe you have to be married and pregnant to appreciate all of this but stay with me here.

You're 9 months pregnant and your husband says "the IRS says we're taking a trip to the city my relatives came from. We can walk but the good news is that we have a donkey you can ride." Did you ever ride a donkey? Ever ride a donkey for a long time? Ever ride a donkey 9 months pregant?

You have to leave behind all your baby preparations, your extended family who would normally be there to help and oogle over your baby, and you'll be walking all day or riding a donkey right at the end of your pregnancy. Forgot how many days and miles the trip is from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

You finally arrive at your destination and all the rooms are taken. We had that happen once after driving until midnight with 5 little kids. All the motel rooms an hour's drive in every direction had "No Vacancy" signs. Would we have slept in a barn if I were 9 months pregnant and ready to deliver? I wasn't pregnant at the time, but even though I'd grown up with barns, I would have probably said "no barn" because I had a track record for complications. When I was pregnant we were among those who gave thanks for medical technology. Anyway, the year of the "no vacancy" motels we were so frustrated that we kept driving the 2 1/2 hours home.

You take the barn accomodations that someone graciously offers you and discover that you're ready to deliver your first baby and you're alone. I grew up on a farm. Lots of creatures live in barns (not just livestock). Hay isn't soft, it's pokey. And there are barn smells and sounds. Two millenia ago they didn't have running water, let alone HOT water. And Mary and Joseph were city people, after all. Smells, dirt, creatures, insects, spiders, dust, no light except moon and stars, night sounds, not clean-let alone sterile ...more disappointment?

So who comes to visit? A bunch of strange men: scraggly, dirty shepherds and their noisy dirty smelly sheep telling wierd stories about stars and music and angles...sorry...angels and LIGHT filling the night sky in the middle of nowhere. If the custom is to offer hospitality, what do you have to offer to shepherds and their sheep a few days after your baby is born in someone else's barn?

Rich kings brought some lovely gifts and more stories but Mary and Joseph were poor. What are they going to do with these amazing gifts? How will they get them back home without drawing attention to themselves? You probably don't have to worry much about thieves and robbers if you're traveling poor but traveling with gifts like these? How will they spend them without the authorities thinking they stole them?

The list goes on. You can probably put yourself in their shoes and think of more disappointments. I didn't try putting myself in Joseph's place...but there you'd have yet another point of view.

We take all the elements of the Christmas story for granted. If you sit and prayerfully ponder some of the human detail and "wonder..." it can add new dimensions to the stories of scripture.

That was my point in the Advent post talking about couples getting ready for a Christmas baby, an unwed teen expecting a baby, couples wondering how they'll be able to financially support a new unexpected child, a couple who has to take a long trip at the end of their pregnancy, toddlers with new babies at home and all the multi-sensory, experientially meaningful experiences of life that tie into various details of the Christmas story - the universal experiences, the joys and hardships that God is so in touch with generation after generation.