There were no marching bands. No crowds gathered in anticipation, no headlines in the local paper. Just a quiet moment between a mother and her newborn child, as I slipped into the world in the small mill town of Southbridge, MA in 1971, and grew up in the even smaller neighboring town of Sturbridge — population 5,000, if you included the livestock.
Nobody noticed. The world kept moving.
About two thousand years earlier, a young couple made an exhausting journey to Bethlehem — not because they chose to, but because they had no choice. There was no room waiting for them, no welcome party, no prepared place. Mary labored and delivered her son in a stable, wrapped Him in strips of cloth, and laid Him in a feeding trough. Bethlehem was a village of maybe 500 people. Nazareth, where the boy would grow up, was smaller still — a forgotten hillside town that the religious and the refined didn't think much of at all.
Which is exactly why, when Philip came running to tell his friend Nathanael that the Messiah had finally arrived, the response was swift and skeptical: