I fumed as I pushed my cart through the crowded aisles of WalMart that Christmas Eve. So many people grabbing at things and shoving their way through was not my picture of how to welcome the Savior. I thought smugly that those other people were just missing the whole point of Christmas, and if I’d just been a little more organized, I wouldn’t be out here at the eleventh hour with them.
That thought brought me up short. Feeling superior wasn’t what Christmas was about, either. I slowed my cart, breathed deeply, and thought about how most of the world was busy and oblivious the night the Christ Child came, just like we seemed to be in WalMart that Christmas Eve. Hmm…if God were to choose a place around my hometown for the birth of the Holy Child, where might He choose? The stable of Bethlehem was the last place that we would have thought of, so ordinary, so mundane, so standard a part of that world that nothing about it seems to us to be special enough to house the Son of God.
And then, it hit me. It would probably be someplace like WalMart. An instant later, right there in those crowded aisles amid those precious people frantically cramming in their last bit of shopping, God’s great Gift arrived for me! Immanuel. God With Us. Right there in WalMart. Who would have thought it?
Where will the Gift find you this year?
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