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Authors: Mike Huckabee

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BOOK: A Simple Christmas
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I felt like Steve Martin's character in the hilarious movie
Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Add a boat to that equation, since I had had to take a boat from the island in the Bahamas where we stayed to Nassau before I flew to New York, and you can basically picture my experience. It took perseverance, patience, and persuasion to do it, but I got home. My eight days at home during Christmas were literally the longest stretch of time I had spent in my own home since my wife, Janet, and I had bought the place two years earlier.
When people asked me what I wanted for Christmas that year, my response was “I want to be home.” I really meant it. There was no material thing that occupied my imagination and “want list” nearly as much as my simple desire to be home with my wife, kids, and dogs.
As I went through the logistical gymnastics of finding a way home, I was reminded of how absurd it seems to have to go through so much effort to do something so simple. I couldn't help but think of how complicated my life had become, with nonstop travel, hotel stays five or more nights a week, speaking engagements around the country, a weekly television show, a constant barrage of e-mails, and plans to do radio commentaries three times a day, five days a week. Don't misunderstand me—I'm truly grateful to be busy. It's an enormous blessing to have a job (several, actually!) and be able to pay my bills and expenses. Nonetheless, life is more complicated than I could ever have imagined it growing up in a working-class family in Arkansas. And I thought for Christmas I just wanted things to be
simple
. I wanted a simple Christmas.
I thought of the first Christmas and how Joseph and Mary had seen their plans to get home get all messed up as well. I'm sure they wanted to be back in Nazareth for the birth of their baby, but instead they ended up stuck in Bethlehem (though in their case, weather and airlines had nothing to do with it). They didn't realize it, but they were having an appointment with destiny. Centuries earlier, when the prophets had predicted the birth of the Messiah, the city for his arrival wasn't Nazareth or even Jerusalem. Instead, it was the sleepy little village of Bethlehem, and although neither Joseph nor Mary had any freinds there, it was inevitable that their baby would be born there. I'm sure they suffered some anxious moments trying to figure out what they would do if they didn't get home. After all, that's where their families were. That's where they would have support and comfort and be surrounded by those who could help make the birth as easy as possible. Instead, all of their hopes and prayers couldn't sway the will of God, who had determined long ago how His son would be brought into the world.
There are times in our lives when things go exactly according to plan. But when God has a bigger purpose than we can possibly imagine, none of our efforts—no matter how well in tentioned or practical—will change the course he has set for us. We might be able to get Delta Air Lines to change our flight, but only God can control the actual journey, and no matter how strange or irrational it might seem to us, there is a purpose to the path.
I'm glad God didn't find a reason to keep me in New York for Christmas. Had He willed it, I would never have made it home. But luckily, my desire to get home didn't challenge an eternally prescribed destiny. My only obstacles were weather, airline schedules, and a couple of out-of-sorts reservation agents who just wanted their shifts to end. God orchestrated every moment of the first Christmas—at the dismay, I'm sure, of Joseph and Mary, who must have been frightened out of their wits—but in the end, he kept it simple. And that, I've learned, is the true message of Christmas—just keep it simple.
Introduction
A Simple Christmas
Whenever I think about the Christmas story, I think about how, if I were God, I would have done the whole thing very differently. After all, the first Christmas was an incredibly big deal. God had decided to show up on earth in the form of a human being so He could show us once and for all how human life is supposed to be lived. For thousands of years, He had watched from heaven as humans destroyed what He had created so carefully. Being God, He knew this was going to happen, and sure enough, it did, but He had a plan.
He had sent prophets, given very explicit written instructions, and even blurted out some pretty loud pronouncements on top of mountains—sometimes with fire, other times with floods—but even though His voice was probably even louder than an Aerosmith concert, people kept being, well, people.
The very first Christmas was going to be a pretty big deal—God wouldn't just write a book or hold a news conference with a spokesman giving a briefing on the way things needed to be. He was coming in person, which in itself would be huge, since no one had ever actually seen God in person. He was always around, but He never showed up “with skin on” and start walking around like us. This time, He was going to take on the form of a human being and hang out in a body like ours and live in the world with us so He could give us the plan in person and live it out in front of us so we wouldn't be able to say we didn't understand. He wasn't going to just
tell
us what to do anymore; He was going to
show
us.
I know a little about promoting a big event. After all, I did run for president (unsuccessfully, but I still did okay given the budget I had to work with), I ran for governor a few times (successfully), and I have launched a TV show and a daily nationwide radio commentary, and been a best-selling author. Sure, it's a far cry from creating the universe, but I figure I have some insight into staging a big event.
And if I'd been God, this whole Christmas deal would have been handled differently.
We're talking about the biggest event since the Beatles on
Ed Sullivan,
Woodstock, or the inaugural events for my swearing in as president. (Okay, so Woodstock was a muddy mess with good music but not nearly enough porta-potties, and my presidential inauguration got derailed by some guy named Obama, but you get my point.)
But God showing up on earth in person? With a face we can see and voice we can hear—the whole deal? An event of this magnitude calls for pulling out all the stops. I'd hire the best caterers and some great bands, get the staging just right, and pick a venue that would be impossible for the press to ignore—maybe Times Square or the National Mall, or maybe really rattle the liberals and do the whole thing right in the middle of San Francisco! Of course, we'd do worldwide satellite feeds and set up remote viewing sites everywhere. There would be various levels of sponsorship, product placements, and of course, naming rights. It would make the Super Bowl look like a Little League game!
But God didn't do it anything like that. If I didn't know better, I'd think the way He showed up for the first Christmas was bungled badly by the worst combination of poor planning and failed execution ever. From the standpoint of putting on a big event, He did
everything
wrong.
The first Christmas was a simple one. So simple it had all the makings of a first-class disaster. It's a miracle it turned out well at all. In fact, that's the whole point. It really was, and remains, a miracle. In fact, it was the greatest miracle of all time. And it really was simple.
The Christmas story we're used to hearing is so clean and neat. We've grown up seeing the sanitized church version performed at annual pageants each December, in which choirs sing, children put on bathrobes and grab broom handles to be shepherds and wise men, and we see a beautiful production with stars in the sky, angels singing, and a quiet and clean little baby, who never even cries, resting peacefully in a box of hay. Judging from these nice little productions, one would think the Christmas story is a heart-warming, Oprah kind of tale, when the actual version probably resembled something closer to Jerry Springer!
I'm not being disrespectful toward the birth of God's son. In fact, as strange as it is, that's the way the whole thing was planned. When God decided to show up in person, He did it in a way that totally defied conventional wisdom. After all, He was the “King,” and we are used to kings showing up wearing some fancy clothes and surrounded by an army, a band with lots of loud brass horns, and an enormous number of attendants to take care of everything from booking the hotels to tipping the baggage handlers to even tasting the food. But the scene of the original Christmas didn't follow this script—not even close.
The story starts with a fairly simple fourteen-year-old girl named Mary and a scraggly teenage boy named Joseph. Mary and Joseph led pretty quiet lives, and neither of them was all that big a deal in their little hometown of Nazareth, which itself was unimportant at that time.
Joseph was Mary's boyfriend. There was nothing unusual about a teenager having a boyfriend, but Mary also had a secret: She had a baby inside her, and she wouldn't be able to hide it much longer. It wasn't as common back then as it is now for a young, unwed girl to become a mother, but it wasn't unheard of. But Mary also had another secret that
was
unheard of. She adamantly insisted she had never had sex with anyone, including Joseph. That was hard for her parents, or anyone else, for that matter, to believe. The only person who believed Mary when she said she and Joseph had never slept together was Joseph himself. But he was still having a very hard time accepting the idea that Mary really hadn't been with anyone else. He wanted to believe she was telling the truth because he didn't want to have to confront the pain of knowing that the girl he hoped to marry one day had been unfaithful to him even before they had exchanged their vows.
Although there was speculation over who the father of Mary's child was, there was no doubt that this young girl was pregnant. It was humiliating to her and to her family to have people talk behind their backs and gossip about who had gotten Mary pregnant.
Mary and Joseph had discussed marriage, but now a baby would be involved from the beginning, and Joseph would have to accept that it wasn't his. What's worse, Mary not only was claiming that she hadn't been with another man but was actually insistent that an angel had come to her from heaven and announced that she would be having God's child. The young man demonstrated an amazing love for this girl, having to actually believe either that she was talking to angels and having God's child or that she was a very mentally disturbed person, but because he loved her so much he was willing to accept her delusional tendencies.
Several months into Mary's pregnancy, Joseph was summoned to the town of Bethlehem, where he had been born, to register for a census that King Herod wanted done. It was clearly a typical government deal—making the entire population travel back to the city of their birth rather than just sending a few census takers to the communities to ask the questions. I would be more critical of such an absurd policy, but today, two thousand years later, the government still does things that are just as inexplicable, like having elderly women take off their shoes and get virtually strip-searched at an airport before getting on a plane to go see their grandkids.
For Mary and Joseph, this meant a trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem; the two towns were about eighty miles apart, but the most popular route took a longer way bypassing Samaria, making it about a week's journey. This sort of trip—twenty miles or more a day on a donkey or walking over rugged and rocky terrain—was very dangerous for a pregnant girl, especially when there were no hospitals on the way. I'm sure this didn't help Joseph believe Mary's story that she was having God's child, because wouldn't God want to do everything possible to make sure that the mother of His child was safe and that His child would be born in a nice, clean, stable place? Instead, it was as if everything that could go wrong did: Young girl gets pregnant, can't really explain who the father is, and is forced to make a long journey with a teenage boy so he can carry out some idiotic government mandate. This was bad enough, but then, to add insult to injury, once the couple arrived at their destination, got counted by the government, and started to head back home, she went into labor.
It's not like there was a stretch of Marriotts along the freeway from Bethlehem to Nazareth. Of course, there were no freeways, either. Back then people would often rent out some space in their homes to be used as inns for travelers who needed a place to stay. But because of the census, there were more people traveling than usual, so all the extra rooms were filled. The couple was getting pretty desperate when a local resident, who felt sorry for these two young teenagers, offered to let them camp out in his barn for the night. The barn was nothing like the red wooden ones we see in the cornfields of Iowa today. In fact, it was actually a stone cave, since it was fairly typical in that day to use natural grottoes as shelters for animals.
Throughout history, this “innkeeper,” as he has been described, has been vilified for “having no room in the inn” and forcing a frightened teenage mother to give birth to the son of God in such an uncomfortable, dirty place. But this is unfair to him. He couldn't give what he didn't have (a vacant room), but he gave what he did have and appears to have done so willingly and joyfully. We can't blame him for the lack of space, but we can certainly credit him for trying to make the best of a bad situation. At least he gave what he had; many of us have far more than an animal shelter but don't even offer that to God. We act with an air of indignation that we'd certainly make the comfort of Jesus a higher priority, but would we? Jesus has never expected us to give Him what we
wished
we had, but rather has always tested to see if we would simply give from what we
did
have.
BOOK: A Simple Christmas
6.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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