Imagine it's the night shift, you're a security guard walking the perimeter of the factory that you and your co-workers have been entrusted with. What would it take for you all to down flashlights, abandon your posts and walk three miles into town to the office block on the high street?
The news that there's a baby in the bottom drawer of a desk on the second floor of the office block?
Would that be enough? Or would it take a host of angels singing in the sky and telling you that not only had a baby been born but the baby was the saviour of the world? And by the way you'll find him in the bottom drawer of a desk in a second floor office.
I like the shepherds. They're ordinary folk, looked down on by most people, doing a job most people didn't want to do: sleeping out on hillsides, looking after dumb animals for not much money. When it comes to it, though, they have their priorities right. They down staffs and scuttle off to check out whether there is indeed a baby in an unlikely crib. And they tell others. I suspect their lives were never quite the same again.
Except of course that on the surface nothing had changed - the hills were still there, no longer alive with the sound of music, the sheep were there, still dumb, still vulnerable to wolves, and their wages were still low and their prospects unaltered. Except. Except for the fact that everything had changed. Hope had illuminated the horizons of their heart as surely as light filled the night sky. There is a God. He has not forgotten us. He is alive. He has intervened. He has a plan. And it changes how I see all of life, even if most of my life does not change.
And this is such good news.
