Bethlehem moments: Are you making room for the unexpected?

Lyndall Bywater encourages us to deepen our trust in God amid the unexpected and unideal times in our lives.

In the Christmas story, Bethlehem is a place of new birth and deeper trust. It is also a place of making room for the unexpected.

Mary wasn’t meant to be in Bethlehem. She was almost at full-term in her pregnancy and she should have been at home in Nazareth. Birth plans might not have been a formal thing back then, but I'm certain that she would’ve had an informal one. She would’ve known which women from her family and community were going to be with her, and they would’ve already helped her to gather everything she’d need for a newborn.

But she wasn’t at home. She was in Bethlehem. She and Joseph had to be there for legal reasons but, as far as they could tell, it was the wrong place at the wrong time. She was going to have to go through the pains and fears of childbirth in a strange town, almost 100 miles from home, with no one from her community, none of her gathered supplies and barely even a roof over her head.

I’ve never had an experience quite as dramatic as Mary’s labour, but I have known many moments when my best-laid plans have come to nothing because everything has changed at the last moment. At best it’s disorientating and at worst it can feel cruel, but in my experience it’s usually a sign that God is bringing something new into being.

If you feel like you’re in the wrong place, that all your plans are being thwarted, this is a Bethlehem moment: take heart and hang on in there, and look for a new era being born.

Joseph would also have planned for the moment when his adopted son would come into the world. He was a carpenter, so I imagine he’d have made a cradle, a beautifully crafted bed where they would lay their precious miracle child – warm and snug, safe from harm.

But in Bethlehem, that exquisite cradle was nowhere to be found. All they had was a manger. How must Joseph have felt? Was he afraid one of the resident animals might come looking for food and inadvertently harm the baby? It was such a far cry from what he had planned as he laid his tiny son down to sleep in a feeding trough.

For Joseph, Bethlehem was a place of laying down, of trusting this newborn child to the cradle his heavenly Father had prepared for him – one that was much rougher around the edges, but just as beautiful in its own way. Laying things down is always an act of trust: when we lay something down, we choose to release our own control and surrender it into God’s care. Perhaps you’ve invested time and energy in something and now it’s finished. Perhaps there’s someone you’ve been caring for, but you know you need to entrust them more fully to God.

If you know God is asking you to lay something down, this is a Bethlehem moment: put your trust in God and look for the new thing God is bringing into being.

This Christmas, and as we journey on into the new year, may we embrace these Bethlehem moments in our lives.