A Shepherd’s Story (Christmas Eve)

a Christmas story written and told by Roger Lynn

December 24, 2016

(click here for the audio for this story)

My name is Jonas, son of Jesse, and I am a shepherd. My father was a shepherd, as was his father before him, and so have I been all my life. The life of a shepherd is sometimes lonely and mostly quiet, without much excitement. Usually the most exciting thing that happens is when a lion tries to get one of the sheep. Then things get pretty crazy for a while, but even then nothing you could call real, honest-to-goodness excitement. You know, the kind that makes a real difference in your life. But I want to tell you about one night, a long time ago, when I was only a boy. It’s funny how some things stay with you, but I can still remember that night as if it were only yesterday. 

We were on the hill just outside of town. The sheep were scattered around the hillside, and we were gathered around a fire near the top of the hill. There were several of us watching that night, and I was the youngest. I had only recently been allowed to stay out in the fields at night. Anyway, we were sitting around talking and laughing, when suddenly it was as if the air itself exploded with life. At first we couldn’t move, we couldn’t think, we couldn’t breath. We didn’t know whether to be scared to death, or out of our minds with joy. It didn’t take long for the joy to win out. Some of us just laughed because we could think of no better way to express what we were feeling. 

You will get different stories about what happened that night, depending on which of us you ask, but I think that is because it was so overwhelming that none of us could really grasp it all, let alone tell about it later in a way that would make any sense. Suffice it to say that nothing like it had ever happened to any of us before, and it was very, very good. I’m sure if you had seen us that night you would have said we were drunk. And you would have been right - we were drunk with pure, undiluted joy. We were laughing and singing and dancing - and we were not alone. The very air around us was filled with laughter and song and dance. 

And then, somehow, we found ourselves in town, out behind the old inn. And things got very quiet. Not because the joy was gone. No, it was still so real we could taste it. And not because we were afraid of waking sleepy townsfolk. We would have awakened the whole world to tell of our joy. I think we got quiet because our joy had moved us beyond laughter to prayer. I had never thought about those two things being related, but that night I learned many things I had never thought of before. 

We went inside the stable, which was out behind the inn. And there we found him. He was just a baby, you know. His parents must have been poor because they couldn’t even stay in the inn. He was lying in the straw and he looked just like any other baby. But that was only when you looked with just your eyes. That night we saw things and felt things and knew things that went far beyond plain eyesight. And we knew that this child was special. We didn’t know how and we didn’t know why, but we knew. And the joy that we felt at the knowing brought tears to our eyes and wonder to our lives and not one of us was ever exactly the same again. 

We walked back to our hillside and our sheep knowing that we had witnessed something that can only be described as the glory of God. And finally we found our tongues again and we sang. Then surely, we must have awaken the whole town with our joy.