It Was An Ordinary Night

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.  
Luke 2:16



It was an ordinary night, in an ordinary stable, filled with the ordinary smells of any common barn. Two ordinary people living an ordinary life. Just some ordinary shepherds out in the fields, tending to their flock and doing their ordinary work. Everything about that first Christmas night was ordinary, except for the baby lying in the manger.

You see, that baby would one day grow up to be anything but ordinary. He would be conceived in the womb of a virgin. After thirty years of life, He would leave His ordinary job as a carpenter and take up His ministry. He would perform miracle after miracle, healing the blind, the lame, the sick, and the hurting. Despite that He was the King of kings who left His Heavenly position to become one of us in this broken world, He lived as a humble servant, seeking to fill the needs of others rather than be served Himself. He would one day die the worst of deaths on the cross. Beaten, bruised, crushed, and killed, He died so that we could live. He died because He loves us with a love that is greater than any pain, greater than even death itself. He died because that is the reason He dressed in flesh and walked onto this earth. But the most extraordinary thing about this extraordinary King was not only His willingness to die for the sins of mankind, despite that He had all the power to take Himself off the cross. It was that death could not keep the Son of God down. In three days, He would rise again. In three days, He would declare victory over the grave.

This man was anything but ordinary, yet He came into this world in the most ordinary of settings. And the same goes for each of our lives today. Just like God showed up in the most extraordinary way through some ordinary people in some ordinary places, He also shows up in the ordinary parts of our lives. We may doubt His presence, and be blinded to His movement. We may feel like our lives lack purpose, that our brokenness is more than we can bear, or that God is not doing anything through us. Yet God uses the ordinary to create the extraordinary. He uses ordinary people like a young girl named Mary, some shepherds in a field, and people like me and you. He uses the ordinary places you encounter on a regular basis to fulfill His plan and His purpose. He shows up in our most broken moments, moving in our hearts and collecting every tear. When we don't feel like He is moving, He is doing more than we realize. When we doubt His presence, He is alive and moving all around us. When we forget that He has a plan, He is in the process of fulfilling His master plan for our lives.

God uses the ordinary to create the extraordinary. Whoever you are, in whatever situation you are in, He is moving. He can do amazing things through you and around you, whether you are sitting at a classroom desk, working at your job site, or just doing the simple, mundane tasks around the house. All the little, ordinary things in your life are a part of a purpose that only He can see.

That baby lying in a dirty stable was God's extraordinary plan in the most ordinary of places, through the most ordinary of people. Without Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the stable, even the full inn and the fields the shepherds worked in, the Christmas story would not be the same. God used each of these people and places in accordance with His perfect plan. Trust that He can use the ordinary to create the extraordinary in your life too!

God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are... 1 Corinthians 1:28