Trinity United Methodist Church Live Nativity

I first stood in the Nativity Scene at Trinity United Methodist Church as a fifteen-year-old during the few days before Christmas 1962. Subtract that year from 2022 and the result is a nice round  -- and pretty large --  number. 

It is a tradition I love. The Advent season can get very hectic. Sheila and I have tried in the last couple of decades to make ours less hectic. We don't do the commercial Christmas anymore. We give fewer gifts and try to make them more meaningful -- usually giving activities rather than things and making contributions to charities that are important to us. 

But for me, the thirty minutes (at least) that I spend standing as a wise man or shepherd in the nativity scene is a precious time of meditation and prayer as beautiful Christmas music plays. A time to settle my thoughts on the real significance of the celebration rather than the glitter and bustle. I know that ours is a pretty crude simulation of what the original nativity scene must have been. So I do some thinking about that. A teenage Mary, traveling with her husband, very pregnant with no place to stay, settling for some sort of outbuilding. She and Joseph are likely very sweaty and dusty from the road. She must have been frightened and definitely uncomfortable. And really, surely Joseph had some doubts about this whole situation. Still he was there and loyal.

Of course the present intrudes on such thoughts sometimes. 

• One night a teen-aged girl, an angel, fainted. 
• Sometimes absent-minded young angels (five year-old Brannon comes to mind) play with their halos endlessly - converting them from halo to necklace and back again repeatedly.
• Animals have escaped -- was it a sheep I remember? 
• And the dadgum donkey would NOT quit braying one year. 
• The goat kept getting all wrapped up in its tether. 
• On really cold nights, I remember "Uncle" Bobby Storey heating bricks in the oven in the kitchen for the characters to stand on for fifteen minute shifts -- it was just too frigid to stand there for longer. 
• On Christmas Eve one year, another really cold one, a very pregnant Sharon Craven helped her husband Frank close down the scene with the Shaws and maybe one other family. A little while later she gave birth to a baby boy.
• And of course every year the shepherd boys and young angels get tickled at the animals that are less than reverent in their bathroom habits.

The 2022 Trinity United Methodist Nativity Scene will go live at 6 p.m. and close at 8 p.m. on December 22, 23, and 24. Please come and join us. If you'd like to take a turn as one of the characters, come on. We'll start dressing the characters each evening in Mobley Hall at 5:30 and again at 6, 6:30, and 7. There'll also be some refreshments there. Or just stop by and observe the scene out front for a few minutes then walk around the building and come fellowship with us for a while in Mobley Hall. You can park behind the church or in the side lot.

I have previously written about the Nativity Scene here and here and here and (very briefly) here.