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Why the shepherds in the Nativity story can inspire you today!<\/p>\n
By Kaeley Harms<\/span><\/span>, Friday, December 19, 2025<\/span>Unsplash\/Dieter K<\/span><\/p>\n I catch myself doing it constantly: walking through town, glancing at someone, and in half a second, I\u2019ve written their entire biography. Missing teeth = hard living. Nice car = they\u2019ve got it together. Fake lashes = high maintenance. Blue hair + septum piercing =\u00a0 this person probably includes pronouns in their Twitter bio.<\/p>\n We\u2019re ruthless little judges, many of us (though most of you are probably smart enough not to admit this publicly). And the daunting part is knowing the same thing is happening to me.<\/p>\n I live in a double-wide. I don\u2019t live high off the hog. I never get my hair done, rarely wear makeup, and sometimes I wonder what people think of me as I deliver groceries to their million-dollar homes. I\u2019m profoundly grateful for the life I have now, a life filled with peace and real love and grace and forgiveness. But it\u2019s also a life still shaped by the long-term consequences of decisions made decades ago.<\/p>\n Usually, I honestly don\u2019t care what people think, which has its perks when you\u2019re doing work that tends to make people hate you. But lately, as middle age settles in and the anonymity of housewifery wraps around my days, I\u2019ve felt that quiet ache surface \u2014 the desire most people have: to matter. Not to be impressive, just to be seen. To count for something in a world that scrolls past.<\/p>\n This morning, that ache ran headfirst into the nativity, and it leveled me.<\/p>\n Only Luke gives us the gritty, tactile details of Christ\u2019s birth \u2014 the manger, the shepherds, the night sky ablaze with angels. Matthew also begins his account at the start of Jesus\u2019 life, focusing on the visit of the Magi, King Herod\u2019s plot, and the flight to Egypt, but it is Luke who draws us closest to the radical humility of that first night.<\/p>\n And the cast of characters Luke highlights is no accident. The King of Kings steps down from glory to be born to a poor couple and laid in a feeding trough. God enters the world not among the polished and powerful but among the small, the low, the ordinary.<\/p>\n But what strikes me most is who gets the first announcement. Not the educated. Not the wealthy. Not the religious elite. Not the think-tank scholars or social climbers or people with curated reputations.<\/p>\n Shepherds. The people no one took seriously. Men whose clothes were stained, whose hands were cracked, who lived on the fringes of society. The ones the religious elite dismissed as unclean, the merchants suspected of every missing lamb, the kind of men no courtroom or temple council would ever take seriously. And Heaven exploded for\u00a0them<\/em>. Angels lit up the night sky for\u00a0them<\/em>. God entrusted the first public proclamation of the Messiah to\u00a0them<\/em>.<\/p>\n Because this is what God does. He chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. The low things to shame the lofty. The overlooked things to reveal what actually matters.<\/p>\n If the nativity happened today, the angels wouldn\u2019t descend on CEOs or influencers or people with glossy success stories, though His gift is obviously for them, too. They\u2019d show up for the guy driving a security truck through an empty Walmart parking lot at 3 a.m. They\u2019d show up for the waitress at the truck stop pulling double shifts to keep her grandkids housed. They\u2019d show up for all the people who feel invisible, unremarkable, or dismissed, people who wonder if anyone sees them at all.<\/p>\n God measures worth differently than we do. We rank people by what\u2019s visible: bank accounts, titles, waistlines, follower counts, the whiteness of their smile.<\/p>\n He looks past all of that and sees the heart that keeps choosing faithfulness when no one is watching, the hands that serve without posting about it, the life that stays steady in the long, quiet middle when the applause has moved on.<\/p>\n The shepherds are the proof.<\/p>\n The men everyone else treated as unclean, unreliable, and unimportant became the first witnesses of the Messiah. The religious establishment of that day is mostly forgotten. Herod\u2019s palace is a ruin. The priests who thought they were the guardians of God\u2019s glory are nameless footnotes.<\/p>\n But every December, in every corner of the world, those shepherds are remembered. Their names may be lost, but their place in the story is secure. Because God chose them, honored them, and entrusted them with the announcement that changed everything.<\/p>\n That is still how He works. Your ordinary days, your hidden struggles, your small obediences, they are not invisible to Him. They are precious. They are the very stuff He delights to use, to notice, to crown with eternal weight. In the Kingdom of God, the overlooked are the ones He lifts up.<\/p>\n The oft forgotten are the ones He remembers forever. And that, dear reader, includes you. It includes me, too.<\/p>\n Originally published at Honest to Goodness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women\u2019s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why the shepherds in the Nativity story can inspire you today! By Kaeley Harms, Friday, December 19, 2025Unsplash\/Dieter K I catch myself doing it constantly: walking through town, glancing at someone, and in half a second, I\u2019ve written their entire biography. Missing teeth = hard living. Nice car = they\u2019ve got it together. Fake lashes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[813,384,1232,215,660],"class_list":{"0":"post-13161","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-christian-living","8":"tag-christmas","9":"tag-dont","10":"tag-feeling","11":"tag-matter","12":"tag-story"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}