When asked, “Where is Alexandria, Indiana?” Bill and I usually reply: “Right in the middle of the cornfields.” This is true. Our small town is not only surrounded by fields of corn, soybeans and wheat, it is in the middle of the state that is surrounded by Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. Beyond Illinois are Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Together we are known as the “breadbasket of the world.”
Like most Midwestern young people, the kids in Alexandria have parents who grew up on working farms, and even though not so many farms are active as they once were, most county and small town kids still belong to a great organization called 4-H where life skills are taught like sewing, canning, baking, woodworking, model-building, and raising farm animals.
The country 4-H fair is held in our own Beulah Park every July where the work of these young people is judged and the prize livestock is auctioned for top dollar. Restaurants in our area proudly advertise that their gourmet establishment serves the winning blue ribbon beef, pork or poultry.
Alexandria is a good place to live because of solid farm families who would still set an extra place at the table if you happen in at suppertime, pull your car out of a snowdrift in the winter with their tractor, or water and feed your dog while you are on vacation. A few of the country places around small towns like ours have turned the extra space in their big houses into Bed and Breakfast Inns since the kids are grown and gone.
So it isn’t hard for Bill and me to imagine an innkeeper taking in extra people in a town too small for big hotels. And feeding them, too. It isn’t hard to imagine how bad the farmer and his wife must have felt when, in spite of their “no vacancy” sign, a weary man and an about-to-deliver pregnant girl knocked at the door.
“Every bed the house is full,” he must have said before he noticed the grimace on the face of the young woman. “Why, Joe,” his wife must have said, “that girl’s in labor. We can’t let that baby be born in the street.”
“Here. Tell you what we’ll do,” the farmer must have offered. “Come on around to the stable. There’s new straw to throw down, and we’ll make a place where you’ll have some privacy. Maud, here, will bring you some hot water and linens; they’re worn, but they’re clean. You can tie your donkey under the overhang.”
Because of that one little clause in Luke’s gospel “because there was no room for them in the inn,” these innkeepers have sometimes gotten a bad rap. But knowing farmers as we do, I think these people went out of their way to give this couple the only other shelter they had. Can you imagine their surprise as the night wore on? Stars stopping over their stable, shepherds making a ruckus about angels singing on the hillside, and then, strangers inquiring about the newborn for weeks afterward.
They’d seen a lot of births in their time. Farmers tend to take such things in stride. But this was no ordinary birthing. These country folk must have had quite a story to share that night and the next few weeks at the Farm Bureau meeting.
All too often, we turn the characters in this real-life drama into celebrities or deities. There was only one deity there that night. The rest were ordinary people experiencing an extraordinary happening. But at the time, they all did the best they could with what they had: some swaddling clothes Mary had no doubt brought with her, a feeding trough turned baby cradle; a rough cloak or two, some clean straw and a stable made warm enough for a newborn by the body heat of some farm animals.
The rest is history…and prophesy.
