Week 3: Day 3

Scripture: Luke 2:6-7; Ephesians 2:1-11

The humility of the birth of the King is not an idea I want to move from too quickly this season. I want to stay in this picture, the inn and the "no vacancy sign," the unimpressive back-up barn and the trough for a bed. The inn with a room for every head to lay but the three people who, in different ways, would fill the night with the cries of hope and rescue. As a child, I struggled with the idea that the King had been mistreated, his parents ignored and discarded. I heard stories of a tender innkeeper who made living quarters in a stable. However, the innkeeper in these conjectures did not feel tender to me. He felt smug or aloof and misinformed, but never tender. He could have afforded to move someone to make way for a King. If he had only known.

The more I learn of Jesus, the more the picture of his birthplace starts to make sense.

Of course it was a humble place, a place for servants and animals and food and waste, not the place for a king. The more I learn of Jesus the more I understand that he could afford to be born in a barn. My friend Linds is in seminary, and one of her professors, a man called Hans Bayer, speaks often of humility.

He explains that humility is the idea that we can afford to let others be the best version of themselves, and this, in turn, makes us the best version of ourselves. The idea changed my life. Humility is the idea that I can afford to let others shine.

Jesus was born in a barn and laid in a manger for more reasons than I could imagine. But I do know that the place matters. God is far too sovereign to be pushed aside by the smug innkeeper that lived in my childhood imagination. In this moment and in this season, the humility of his birth is a reminder that the King could afford to let others have a place to lay their head.

I want to be more like Jesus. I want to change in deep ways this season, in ways that make me understand that I can afford to let others...

Prayer:

Deliver me, O Jesus, from the desire of being loved, from the desire of being extolled or honored or praised or preferred. From the desires of being consulted, approved, popular.

Deliver me from the fear of being humiliated, despised, forgotten, wronged or ridiculed.

From the fear that others may be loved more than I; instead, Jesus, grant me the grace that I might desire it. That I might desire for others might be more esteemed than I. The desire that others may increase and I may decrease.

That they may be chosen and I set aside, them praised and I unnoticed. That others may become holier than me, but that you would make me as holy as I should be. Amen.

-adapted from a prayer by Mother Theresa