Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent

Many years ago, I was asked to give a children’s message during the Christmas season and started thinking about how to include a child character in the narrative. What if there were a little shepherd boy… and what if for some reason, he ended up missing out on the moment when the skies opened and the angels sang? (I had long been haunted by the Ray Bradbury short story “All Summer in a Day” about a little girl on a fictionalized Venus who ends up missing out on the one day of summer that comes only every seven years.) 

I kept asking myself the kind of questions authors ask themselves in plotting a story: Why would the shepherd boy miss out on the Main Event? Well, maybe he was searching for a lost sheep. Ooh! And then maybe he finds the sheep at the manger! But why would his sheep have gotten lost in the first place? And why (and how) would the lost sheep make its way to the cradle of baby Jesus? Well, maybe the lost sheep was injured…no, lame…so straggling behind the others. And as for why the sheep would be at the manger, maybe it was the least and lowliest animals who had been summoned there to be the first to witness the miracle. 

To my story I added a blind ox and a donkey missing one ear. But how to end the story? Of course, Benjamin, my little shepherd boy, finds his sheep at the manger and also finds his Savior. But I needed to tie in that original element of Benjamin missing out on the singing angels in the first place. Finally, I came up with a last line I still love, which ends the story (first told right here at St. Paul’s) which became my picture book One Small Lost Sheep: “Benjamin heard the angels now, but this time they were singing inside his heart.”

—Claudia Mills