Up the Sunbeam

-- Several days ago, Jennifer Lee posed a fun question on facebook.  She asked, "Which nativity character do you most closely identify with?" When I saw her question I was just breezing through and didn't have time to respond, but that question stayed with me as I went through the rest of a customarily busy leading-up-to-Christmas week. I guess this was kind of a new thought to me. I had never really tried to see myself in the characters, except to imagine what it was like for them as they lived their part in the story.  I did play the angel in the school Christmas play in grade 3 (that's what they call it in Canada where I lived at the time).  My costume was wonderfully homemade--a soft white robe made out of an old sheet with silver tinsel sewn around the hems of the billowing sleeves, wings my mother made (I can't remember how) and a tinsel-wrapped wire halo that was hard to keep from tipping off my slippery curls. (That was way back when schools st...

-- The re is something about Christmas that flat-out refuses to be simple. It just will come with cramped quarters, groans and struggle, hard work and extreme inconvenience--Mary knew all about it, didn't she? Her life, so beautifully planned, suddenly and monumentally interrupted by none other than God Almighty! The angel He sent, Gabriel, told Mary she was favored among all women, and had been chosen to bear God's only Son. Her still innocent child's heart was so trusting, so willing to accept the honor and the profound responsibility of parenting the great I AM. Her faith astounds. "I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." Luke 1:38 NIV As if she and Joseph didn't have enough to deal with, what with trying to explain the baby before the wedding and all, suddenly Caesar Augustus had his brilliant idea to call for a census. Not only that, but they had to travel all the way from Nazareth to Bethle...