Open Advent Window 11

Shepherds – first adpoters

Reflection by Adrian Rogers (aka Colonel Hathi)

I love nativity sets with their beautiful angels and comely Shepherds.

Sometimes it dawns on me that these few lowly shepherds were (apart from Joseph & Mary) perhaps the first ever Christians. Literally they were the first of billions of people that have followed over the last two-thousand years!

I wonder what they thought about what was happening to them. Firstly, the visitation of the angels which probably left them overwhelmed and totally confused. Then their journey from the fields into town. What was going through their minds? Excitement, expectation, a feeling of “this is all too surreal”? And then arriving at the stable and discovering what they had been told about a baby being born was true.

How do you think you would feel, if you were one of those shepherds that night?
This situation is stranger still if you think about the shepherd’s place in society. They were, if not entirely shunned, certainly looked down upon by many in their community, for shepherding was the equivalent of a modern low skilled, unsociable hours sort of job; not exactly the “career of choice” of the day.

And yet these people, uneducated, poor and socially inferior were the ones that God, perhaps from the beginning of time, had decided were going to be the first to hear the news that God had come to live on earth as a man!

It makes me think. How does my choice of company compare with His? Do I have anything like the same open-mindedness, or do I only know people who are more like me?

Print and Colour a Nativity Scene

Each Advent Day we will provide one page for you to print, colour, cut and arrange in to a Nativity Tableaux.

Introduction to the Printable Nativity Advent Calendar to ColourDownload