When I was little, “during the Great Depression,” I went to Sunday School every Sunday clutching my three pennies to put in the collection jar. I loved going to Sunday School because they told stories, sang songs and prayed for me and everybody. But the two things I really liked were Vacation Bible School and the Christmas Pageant.
Bible School was fun and games and cookies and milk with other kids my age, but the Christmas Pageant was really important and each year I would try to be Mary and hold the baby Jesus and be the center of it all.
However, Jane with the blue eyes and the golden Shirley Temple curls was Mary. Well, maybe I could be an angel with wings who stood above Mary – Nope! Well, if there weren’t enough boys (I knew I could never be king) maybe a shepherd and carry a crook – Nope again!
The teacher called my name, “Betty, you can be a lamb.” That’s what I always ended up as because I was skinny, breathed through my mouth, and had cotton white, straight hair.
Once again I would dawn a new suit of long underwear, they’d glue cotton balls around my head and other places. Then they would stick a little shoe black on the end of my nose. I was fidgety but I was a good lamb, but always a lamb.
I look back now, some eighty years later, and think being a lamb was important. Who was it on that cold winter night who heard the angels sing and gazed at that brilliant star? Who followed the shepherds and stood at the manger at that miraculous event? So many of them that it appeared as a multitude of soft white everywhere – Who Indeed? Lambs, that’s who. Now I am glad I was a lamb.
If I may paraphrase an anthem I sang a long time ago, I think you will recognize who was the most important Lamb in the stable. IT WAS ALL ON A WINTER’S EVENING; I LOOKED ON THE LAMB OF GOD.
Betty Long
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