Leftovers

A long time ago, I used a team of horses pulling a wagon piled high with hay to feed cattle during the winter months in Montana.  The two horses were named Tiny and Tom.  Tom weighed 2,005 pounds and Tiny weighed in at an even 2,000.   Every winter morning, I would roll out of bed about 4am and stumble out to the horse barn to get them ready for the day with several pounds of rolled oats and ½ bale of grass hay each.   You know what happens to that much roughage, don’t you?  About every three to four weeks, I would shovel the “leftovers” out the door into a large pile!

There is one lesson I learned from all this – stables stink! 

Luke 2.6&7 –And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.

    

Jesus was born in a stable.  Historians tell us that the stable was not like what we see on our Christmas cards!  It was probably more like a cave – dark, damp, and filled with the stench of “leftovers.”  It was in the midst of all of this that Jesus came to us. 

He comes to us in the same way today.  He comes in the midst of the “darkness and stench” of our lives.  He doesn’t wait until we get “cleaned up.”    

Here’s an amazing truth.  It is when we turn our lives over to God that the real “house cleaning” begins!! 

Merry Christmas!