Mesa Farm Living Nativity

I went to see a living nativity last night at a farm owned by an old friend, Dale Perkins. He was the farm steward at Heifer Project in Rutland where my kids and I volunteered one year as a homeschool project.  I went with my friend Marla. So, with two missionary-types in the picture how could it not be a great night? And it was. I have seen the Christmas show at Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster, PA where they use real animals and have flying angels on invisible wires and it is fantastic - but it's a slick production, whereas Mesa farm is the real thing. It struck me that here we were more than two thousand years after the event. a bunch of unrelated people gathered in a real barn (well riding arena) smelling real manure, watching a donkey be stubborn, braving a pretty cold night to share in seeing a re-enactment of that event. This year, it seems,  angels favor Ugg boots, donkeys don't like to be on a short tether, and camels can work up a powerful appetite, but angels are right there to hand over some hay from the manger. Sheep poop and donkeys bray at inopportune times. Mary had an easy labor - the angel handed the baby to her - but the baby didn't cry, just like in the song we all sang. There was something about the cold and the dirt and the hay and the actors wearing jeans and farm boots under the robes that captured what must have been the meanness of the real occasion. Nobody could make this up - that God himself became a man in the lowliest of places. Yet it is fitting that He was born in a stable, because He was surrounded by all kinds of  natural life.