No room at the inn

OK, so we all probably know the story (Luke 2:7), tired travelers, Mary and Joseph are looking for a place to stay while they await the birth of their baby Jesus. Many renditions of the story conjure up images of the couple going from inn to inn only to have the owner barking at them to go away and slamming the door. And then they arrived at one single inn owner, his inn was full, but he offered them what he had: the stable.

Well, in the past few years, this seems to be a common theme in my life. It all started one Christmas Eve. I was 7 months pregnant with my 3rd child and we just wanted to go to Christmas eve mass at church as a family. (The other two children were 6 and 3). We got there early enough, so it seemed, but every pew we saw with space, had someone sitting there probably for the past 3 hours 'saving' seats for his/her family. It actually got quite comical as our neighbors who were sitting in the back of church were watching a pregnant lady and her family looking for a place to rest only to have the occupants barking at us and slamming the virtual door in our faces.

I honestly can't remember where we ended up sitting for mass, but ironically the sermon was about........"no room at the Inn". Our priest likes to drive home his point, so the entire congregation had to recite that phrase over and over during that mass. Later that evening we laughed with our friends over the fact that our situation in looking for a seat was very similar to the situation that Mary and Joseph were in that night long ago.

Fast forward to last month......we rented a home in Florida, right near Disney World. We rented it directly from the owner and had all of our arrangements made. We drove from our home in Pennsylvania to Kissimmee, Florida, the 5 of us, plus my mother-in-law and her sister; it took 2 days (with stops) and was over 1000 miles. The very tired travelers pull up to the home that we rented only to see that the other family who also rented it were already moved in. I phoned the owner only to discover that he neglected to tell the realtor that helps him with rentals that he had rented the home to us. With much conversation and negotiation, the realtor and owner found us another home (stable, if you will) to live in for the week. We were a bit inconvenienced, but it worked out for us and the rest of the week went well. Once we were settled in, I texted a message to our neighbors (the ones from church), it simply said: "No room at the Inn".

Now, come last Friday. My neighbor (same one from church and that I texted) and I had our pre purchased tickets to the Sex and the City movie since Tuesday of last week. We were so excited, as we were talking about this night since the date of the movie release was announced. We arrive at the movie theater only to realize that it was so crazy crowded that we could not get two seats next to each other. Now, we weren't tired travelers, nor was either of us pregnant, we just wanted to enjoy our movie with our smuggled-in Cosmopolitans, so we looked at each other and said.........you guessed it: "no room at the Inn". She said she isn't going to hang out with me anymore as it has become a common theme in my life.


As it turned out, on Friday, as we searched for 2 seats kinda near each other, the theater announced that another screen was showing it and there were plenty of seats, so we did get 2 seats mid-theater where we enjoyed our cosmos and our movie.