Perspective

Many of us have made party plans, vacation plans, plans on leaving the country. I’m writing this article on Christmas Day and I certainly planned on driving out to Lipa to spend a week at our farm. Instead I am sitting in Pasig because some ill-tempered tempest called Typhoon Nina decided to come to the Philippines for the Christmas holidays.

I don’t like it when I spend weeks making plans and find them stalled or forcibly set aside like a plane or a ship due to inclement weather. But then again I know that staying put is far smarter than getting wet or injured. I was also reminded in church about how man makes plans but God ultimately decides.

For the last month of 2016, our Pastors in Victory Christian Fellowship a.k.a Every Nation ministries put together a preaching series revolving on the Nativity. But unlike romanticized Nativity stories, what they put together was a 4-part series that started out with people having plans and God sending his Angel to disturb their plans. From the initial “disturbance” the stories turn into real life challenges for the main characters, how they respond and the eventual outcome that is now the best part of human history.  Far from being  “Holy – Holy”, the series taught us how different people react depending on their level of faith, their ability to set aside reality or realistic boundaries and cross over to God’s way of doing things.

The series started out with how the Virgin Mary had been engaged and was probably busy making wedding plans in her mind when an angel appears and basically rewrites the life she thought she would be living. You have to admire how obedient and connected Mary must have been to God, to simply obey and say: “Let it be done according to your will.” In an age when many women can’t swallow or speak the line: “I will Submit and Obey to my husband” on their wedding day or any day of the year, the young woman Mary clearly knew who and what God was all about. It was not blind faith but complete trust in someone she “knew” growing up. Proof of this was when she did not speak or exhibit fear in an encounter with an angel that always sends the bravest of men in the Bible, down on their knees shaking and pleading.

Then there was Zechariah the aging husband of Elizabeth, cousin of Mary. In spite of being a very pious and God loving man who occupied a place in the Temple of God, Zechariah could not believe and wrap his mind around God’s decision to give him a son who would later be called “John the Baptist.”  He had resigned himself to the “reality” that he and his wife Elizabeth were too old to have a child. He obviously had plans for retirement and simply serving in church until he died. His mistake was he verbalized his disbelief using age and human logic! The angel, if not God, clearly got fed up with his negative dialogue that they decided to stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth for nine whole months. Elizabeth must have slept in heavenly peace all that time.

If Mary was brave and obedient, so was Joseph. He was planning on having a wedding party not a pity party becoming the adoptive father of some “heavenly” kid. Imagine being “terrorized” by the visitation of an angel. He may have been portrayed as a Carpenter but I bet the last thing he ever imagined honeymooning in was a stable surrounded by livestock, doing role reversal acting as “Mid-wife” to Mary and then being on the run from a lunatic King Herod. Joseph certainly deserves to be the icon of Survivor Challenge and the poster image for Foster Parents of the Universe. He “did right by Mary,” followed God’s will and carried on with life with no further drama or lamentation.

The final characters in the series were the Shepherds. Yes Shepherds not the Three Wise Men or Three Kings. I don’t think they were really three wise men seeing as how they had to get directions to get to Jesus from a paranoia stricken king, and they might have pointed Herod in the right direction to slaughter Jesus if God did not send them off with a warning and a different direction.

So, why the Shepherds? I suppose it’s because they had very simple mindsets. They did not tend to complicate things, they were not “mental” or tended to over think things. An Angel shows up, tells them what’s going down, they in turn say: let’s check it out and off they go to Bethlehem. They may have been simple people but they were not stupid. They went to see for themselves if this heavenly being was telling the truth or playing games with them. Considering the perpetual battle between angels and demons, I suppose they were well aware of misrepresentations made by the devil.

It’s ironic how simple shepherds who had no WiFi, no iPhone/Android tablet or IPad, No Facebook or Twitter had enough common sense to go and check out the story. The guardians for the sheep went to VERIFY unlike modern day tech savvy kids who fall for fake news portals. Once they confirmed the message and the events to be true, they REJOICED and then they SHARED the good news.

Sadly, many people have lost the ability to recognize things worth rejoicing for. Our sense of entitlement has made us blind to these and robbed us of our sense of gratitude and appreciation. We often talk about needing hope, inspiration or a vision. There’s actually a lot of that spread around but many people insists on defining what their Hope is all about, who should inspire them and peg their visions on material foundations, numbers and pleasures. Sorry, just like Mary, Zechariah, Joseph and the Shepherds, we all make plans until God comes in and says: No You’re better than that and have I got a plan for you!

For I know the plans I have for you says the Lord; plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future – Jeremiah 29:11

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