GBBW: Jesus is Here!
Christmas, week 3/5
It’s week 3 of the Christmas Series for the Great Big Bible Story Walkthrough! Each Sundays in December, you’ll find:
A paraphrase of the story
Ideas to wonder, play, and pray
Background details for grown ups to help with kids’ awesome questions
and there’s a preschool version for kids under 5 as well!
Normally the GBBW includes a mini-essay, but just for this month we’re doing mini-devotions instead.
Every day the internet is full of fresh examples of people chasing more – more power, status, influence, money, preferably all of the above. When this is the diet of our news and social media feeds put on our plates, it can be hard to remember there’s any other choice.
But into that world, if we let him, comes Jesus, breaking through the noise with sheer silence. It’s a profound and beautiful thing not only that God comes to be with us, but how. The contrast to ‘the way the world works’ couldn’t be more clear when we gaze at the God of the universe, laying in a bed of straw because there was no room for him anywhere else.
Perhaps part of why Jesus came to be God with us was to show us beyond any possible doubt that more doesn’t equal life, and that we can choose instead to rest with God in the hay.
READ
Luke 2:1-7
At that time a decree was issued by Augustus Caesar: a census was to be taken of the whole world. 2 (This was the first census, before the one when Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 So everyone set off to be registered, each to their own town. 4 Joseph too, who belonged to the house and family of David, went from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judaea, David’s city, 5 to be registered with his fiancée Mary, who was pregnant.
6 So that’s where they were when the time came for her to have her baby; 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him up and put him to rest in a feeding-trough, because there was no room for them in the normal living quarters.
REFLECT
Fill in the blanks:
I don’t need more _________________________________.
What I really need is ________________________________.
PRAY
God, To our clamoring world, our noisy souls, our frenzied pursuit of more, you offer what we really, truly need. Help me to trust that what you offer, in your gentle and quiet way, is really what gives life. May I rest in you and with you. Amen.
