Christmas: Come as You Are

Only two days away from my eagerly anticipated destination, I departed Peninsula. My faithful recumbent trike sliced through the frigid morning air. My body was weary and my face numb, but I peddled on.  

I was completing the Ohio to Erie Trail (OTET) with George. We had been working on it off and on since summer. We usually rode a total of 40 to 50 miles, returning to our cars at the end of each day. Essentially, we were doing the trail northbound and southbound simultaneously.

Upon our late afternoon return to Peninsula (we had set a personal record of peddling over 52 miles that day), we found the road to the parking lot illuminated by Christmas decorations and a North Pole sign. Pretty cool, I thought.

We loaded our bikes into our cars, but we weren’t done in Peninsula yet. We wanted to eat in town before driving back to our primitive campsite 20 miles away. Peddling that far on crushed gravel trails gives one a hefty appetite.

I noticed a Santa and a few people dressed as elves getting out of cars as we left the lot. I didn’t give them much thought, though. Swirling in my head was the comfort food awaiting me at the Leaping Lizard restaurant.

The food was good and the room toasty. George and I discussed our strategy going forward. Drive back to the campground, depart at 5:00 a.m. for a new parking spot, and begin our last 20 miles to Lake Erie. This would complete our bike journey on the OTET. (Of course, there would still be 20 miles to pedal back to the car. But what was that compared to the 600 or so miles we’d already accumulated on the trail this year?)

I was not in a hurry to leave the warmth of the restaurant, but I pulled the door open and walked out into the evening air. That’s when I saw the Cuyahoga Valley train. It had multiple shiny cars, every window framing expectant kids’ faces. I waved but noticed little reaction. Maybe even some disappointment?  

Was it my apparel? I’d been camping and biking in very cool weather for a couple days now. I was going more with function than form. Most of my cold weather apparel is LL Walmart. For the first time, I noticed I looked a little grubby compared to others in town.

We walked on, characters of the Polar Express movie dancing in my mind. My nostalgic thoughts were interrupted, however, by a lady with a walkie-talkie and a bright yellow jacket. She told us we needed to stop walking through that area until the train pulled out. We would disappoint the kids. We didn’t have the correct North Pole apparel.

I knew I should’ve brought my elf suit along.

Maybe ten (long) minutes passed till the train left the station and the lady said we could go on walking through to the parking lot. She thanked us for waiting, and all in all she was nice enough. I was just wondering why I hadn’t seen any signs to let us know we weren’t welcome as part of the program.

The script was flipped at the first Christmas program, 2000 years ago. It was the outsiders who were the only ones personally invited to attend.

Shepherds weren’t likely to get a smile from people watching out their windows. They probably didn’t meet the local dress code, either. According to an article titled “Shepherds’ Status” by Randy Alcorn, “They shared the same unenviable status as tax collectors and dung sweepers . . . Shepherds were officially labeled ‘sinners’—a technical term for a class of despised people.”   

To be fair to them, however, I have run across other commentaries that don’t disparage them nearly as much.  One thing in common, though, is agreement that the shepherds weren’t on the upper rungs of the social ladder.

So why did the angels appear to shepherds first to announce the good news of a Savior? I’ve heard it said it was because they were Jesus’s kind of people. The Good Shepherd came to earth not for the righteous, but for sinners, the people that the righteous despised. Those “sinful” shepherds would have laid down their lives for their flocks. The Good Shepherd, lying in that manger, would eventually make that very sacrifice.

I get why I was stopped that evening. It was a little weird, though, feeling like an outsider. But the more I think about it this Christmas season, the more I realize that being an outsider isn’t such a bad role after all.