Member Chip Bristol
The Christmas story has an inn and a stable. One is located on the street; the other is out back. One is lit, decorated, and worthy of important visitors. The other sits dark, silent, and used for those things the inn keeper wants out of sight. Both are vivid reminders that we, too, have inns and stables, and the season of Advent invites us to consider them both.
Inns are the places we decorate and want people to see. We light them so people will take notice and place our Christmas-card-like photographs throughout. Inns are where we give voice to our successful careers and happy families.
Out of sight, we have stables that serve another purpose. Located out back, where we don’t want people to go, is the place we put things so they’re out of sight. Into our stables we store our mistakes, wounds, and anything else we’d like to hide or ignore. Unlike an inn, a stable is dark and silent, and we rarely let people visit.
What’s interesting is Mary and Joseph arrive looking for a place to stay and they end up not in the inn but the stable. There’s no room in the inn, no place among the prominent visitors. Instead, they end up in the stable, and it is there Christ is born.
He still is.
Despite our best efforts, despite the many wonderful things we’ve achieved, despite the wonderful people with whom we surround ourselves, Christ is often born in the stables of our lives. He seems to gravitate to the places “out back,” the poorly lit places where our wounds and sorrows reside. It’s there that he feels most at home, I believe. Just ask the parents who lost a child and found another couple with whom to share that tragic loss, ask the men and women who have given up one kind of addiction or another and sit together each morning, or ask someone facing a terminal illness. They’ll tell you, if you don’t feel it yourself, that Christ is present is such places.
He might not be lying in a manger, but he’s there wrapped in swaddling clothes of every kind, seeking to be born into our lives once and for all.
