When The Stable Is Enough

This Christmas season, I’ve been visualizing the manger a lot. And I’m being more honest in how I see it. It turns out its not the tidy creche scene that I set out every year where the figures have on flowing robes and tidy hair and the manger itself has straw that I just bought because hey, it’s got to look nice for guests and family. This year I’m turning my mind’s eye to how it probably really was- a place that was dark, cramped, loud, and let’s be honest no doubt, smelled terrible. Which feels important. Because it would have been so much nicer, and frankly more efficient, if the Bible had gone with something closer to a Disney version of events. A clean little cottage. Everything in place. Soft lighting. No sharp edges.

That’s how most of us start our days, at least in our heads. I wake up with a plan that looks perfectly reasonable smooth, orderly, well-lit. And then somewhere between my morning smoothie and sitting down at my desk, something unplanned shows up. Or several things. And suddenly the day that was supposed to glide is bobbing around like a small boat in choppy water.

A disruption like this could wreck a mood entirely. I learned early on a fundamental lesson: life is going to be messy every single day. Not occasionally. Not just on the bad days. Every day. And oddly enough, once I accepted this fully it was so much easier to accept the actual “this isn’t going according to the plan in my mind” reality.

One of the gifts of having lived a while is not just the ability to reinvent yourself, but to reboot how you respond. You stop expecting the clean cottage. You learn how to manage the stable. Because in this chapter of life, it’s guaranteed that things will happen that you didn’t plan for—and couldn’t have.

Which brings me back to Mary and Joseph. There was no room at the inn. I’d be willing to bet that when Gabriel delivered his big announcement, Mary may have imagined a clean bed and fresh linens as part of the arrangement. Instead, she got a stable. She adjusted. She stayed fluid. She didn’t complain to God, Gabriel or Joseph. She got down to business and made the circumstances work.

So as we round the bend toward Christmas, maybe this is the reminder: don’t be surprised if what greets you isn’t neat or ideal. Sometimes the holy thing shows up in the mess. And sometimes the stable is exactly where the story begins.