Insignificant

Just like any other morning at work, I stepped out of my car and started walking toward the building. There on the ground not two steps away was a plain half dulled copper penny. I turn just a bit and bent over plucking the insignificant coin up from the wet pavement. I adjusted my shoulder bag and rotated my new acquisition slowly in my fingers. It seemed ordinary enough. The conversation I had recently been in with the Lord came to mind. The features were plain to read and with just a bit of squint the date was 1990; twenty plus years ago. Still what did it represent? Copper was a softer metal and made me think of Daniel statue part of bronze.

 The Lord’s birth celebration was close. Christmas day we call it. His birth was certainly insignificant by the world’s standards. A “nobody knows them” family having a single child in a place far from home without even a proper bed for mother or child. He was born on an insignificant day in an insignificant town near an insignificant inn surrounded by insignificant animals. There was no room in the inn, just the available stable for this couple and their donkey. It would take a lot of these pennies to make a difference in this world today. It took only one insignificant child being born in an insignificant place to permanently and significantly change the world forever. God provided the world with a way out of the madness that seemed to grip the hearts of greedy, selfish mankind.

 We were to gather for a Christmas dinner that very evening. What a marvelous provision was made. More food than three times our number could consume. New friends would be made, old friends greeted and enjoyed, it would be a special occasion. We would be there because of that insignificant child. Some said he never existed. He was just a made up story. Some said He was real enough, but just a good moral man, a teacher of kindness and right ways of living. I believed differently. Once I thought like they; but over thirty years ago I had come face to face with the reality of His person. Jesus Christ the son of God, God the Son. He had been born in that stable, He had come to teach righteousness and holiness and he had also come to die as the propitiation for the sins of all men against a sovereign God. He is anything but insignificant.