Why Did God Pick the Wrong Place?

Can you hear Mary?  We often try to deify her, but come on, she was a teenager.  Even the most spiritual teens I know will gripe.  I can hear her on that last day, as the labor pains begin saying, “ I didn’t know when I said yes that it would mean I would have to do this.  It’s too hard God!  I can’t make it.  I can see Bethlehem off in the distance but this pain is too great.  I can’t make it.  And as they seek lodging, she is to the point where she is having to stick her sleeve in her mouth so it muffles her screams of pain from the labor.  And now she’s stuck in a barn, with the smell of animal poop filling it.  She knows it is time and I’m sure between contractions she must have wondered about the irony of it all.  I’m sure she must have said, “No God, not here!  Your Son deserves better than this.  Please find us a better place!  Get us out of this dump!”  Pretty hard to say at a time like this, “I am the Lord’s servant, may it be done to me as you have said.”

So why did God pick the wrong place?  Why didn’t he just whip up an ultra-modern hospital out on the plain with a giant rotating beacon to guide them in?  His Son of course would be the sole occupant and then the beacon could forever guide the faithful on their pilgrimage to the hospital shrine.  The birthplace of Jesus.  But the barn?  Wrong place!

You may feel you are in the wrong place in your life.  You may have committed your life to Jesus and then feel He abandoned you.  Take a lesson from Mary.  Such is not the case.

The message of Christmas is that God intrudes upon the weak and the vulnerable, and this is precisely the message that we so often miss. God does not come to that part of us that swaggers through life, confident in our self-sufficiency. God leaves his treasure in the broken fragmented places of our life. God comes to us in those rare moments when we are able to transcend our own selfishness long enough to really care about another human being.

He must necessarily lead us through those dark places, not to burden us or to scare us, but to change us.  We look at our circumstances and say “I don’t like that.”  God isn’t concerned about our circumstances.  He is interested in our heart.  I like how Rev John Schmidt put it.

Maybe where we are right now in life feels like the wrong place.

Either looking back to what was or looking forward to what might be. 
-- Just not here and now!

We assume that we are going to have to leave this place to get to the right place.

But God is present in all our "wrong" places. God is at work there.

Our circumstances are not the most important thing in life. God is, and our response to Him.  God uses the wrong places of life to make the right changes in us.

Our focus is on making things right for us.  God's focus is making things right in us.

We need to do what God has given us to do.  Right now, right here.

On the wall of the museum of the concentration camp at Dachau is a large and moving photograph of a mother and her little girl standing in line of a gas chamber. The child, who is walking in front of her mother, does not know where she is going. The mother, who walks behind, does know, but is helpless to stop the tragedy. In her helplessness she performs the only act of love left to her. She places her hands over he child's eyes so she will at least not see the horror to come. When people come into the museum they do not whisk by this photo hurriedly. They pause. They almost feel the pain. And deep inside I think that they are all saying: "O God, don't let that be all that there is."

 (from Sermon Illustrations.com)

God's hears those prayers and it is in just such situations of hopelessness and helplessness that his almighty power is born. It is there that God leaves his treasure. As for Mary, so it is with you and I that it is there, right in the middle of the brokenness, right in the middle of the stench, right in the middle of the darkness, when you feel you are lost or in the wrong place,  that’s when Christ is born anew within.
 

Don’t miss it.  Let it happen in you once again and you will find the Hope of the world will restore your hope and give you strength to go on.