The Tumbling Nativity
by Chonda Pierce
Let me tell you what happened to our family just a few Christmases ago. We inherited a nativity set. That sounds like a strange thing to inherit, but my brother was moving out of town, and he had one of those nearly life-size sets—the entire set: Mary, Joseph, Jesus in the manger, all three wise men, two camels, and a sheep. They were big and plastic and painted in bright colors and each one burned a single 40-watt bulb. That’s 360 watts when fully lit. We built a stable from scraps of wood and brought in a bale of straw, and the whole grouping was quite nice. Very Christmasy.

Then a few days before Christmas, I had one of those days when the Christmas spirit just left me. I wasn’t feeling it. In fact, I was a scrooge—snapping and barking. Maybe you’ve been there? I shouldn’t have been surprised at how I felt because it was the same old Christmas craziness: everyone seemed rushed, everything seemed so expensive, traffic was too slow, It’s a Wonderful Life had shown eighteen times already and so far I’d missed every single showing. I guess the last straw was when we came home from the mall late one night. It was wet and cold and windy and—did I mention that all the players of our nativity scene were hollow plastic and quite lightweight? It doesn’t take much of a breeze to tip one over and just a bit more to send them off sailing.

We pulled up in time to watch part of the tumbling show. David called out their names as they passed through the car’s headlights: “Mary! Joseph! Jesus!” In a blink, our lovely family had been scattered all over the neighborhood. Wise men were upended in the ditches. A camel grazed in a holly bush. And the worst thing of all was having to knock on the neighbor’s door late at night and ask for Jesus back. And after I’d pressed the neighbor so hard at Easter too. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Make up your mind, will you?”

Yeah, that pretty much killed the Christmas spirit for me. So what did we do? We regrouped, literally. First, we rescued all the nativity players and placed at least one good brick in the base of each figure. We discovered that the tumble had pretty much knocked out all the bulbs, but the good news was that David had some spare bulbs in the garage.

Now that the figures were better anchored and more than fully lit, David plugged in the nativity set and—whoa!—heaven came down and rested in our front yard! And just like that, the Christmas spirit was back.

So what do I do when the spiritual meter points to the low end? I just do. I listen to praise music, I sing praise music, I read my Joyce Myers and Beth Moore books, I read my Bibles (NIV, NASB, Living, King James, and the Message). If I depend on emotion, emotion will let me down. So I do what I know. And the funny thing about feeling spiritual is that if you just do what you know, just be spiritual, eventually that feeling will return. That’s when a smattering of laughter becomes rollicking guffaws, a quiet reverence becomes Hallelujah! And plastic nativity characters light up the neighborhood with at least 900 watts of brilliant white. Seems we were out of 40-watt bulbs, so David used 100s—nine of them. Now that’s the spirit!

From Roadkill on the Highway to Heaven by Chonda Pierce