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  1. Manger Scene

From the recording Something You Already Know

I don't like the sanitizied sweetness of most depictions of the birth of Jesus. When we do this we negate the essential power of why God would do it the way he did, and we dishonor the faith of Mary and Joseph, who, in spite of miraculous revelation, must have struggled mightily to believe what they'd been told as events unfolded the way they did.

Lyrics

An angel scared a teenage girl, said she’d bear the savior of the world
Told her she was favored most, and she was pregnant by the Holy Ghost
But her fiancé could not understand, he knew there must’ve been another man
He was just about to let her go when an angel in a dream told him it was so…
Now Joseph understood, but I doubt that many other people would
Nine months of gossiping behind their backs and then they found out they had to pay more tax
‘Cause Caesar Augustus had a great new plan to get more taxes from every man
Just send ‘em all back to their own hometowns and make ‘em lay more money down
Is this the same story that you know? I’m sure they doubted, they didn’t want to go
They probably thought God was out of his mind
They didn’t know the rest of the story line

Still Joseph and Mary walked all week long, though it seemed so crazy, it felt so wrong
They made it down to Bethlehem but there was no room in the inn for them
So someone pointed them to the caves, out with the animals and runaway slaves
They found a place that was mostly dry, that’s when Mary began to cry
‘Cause there was mud on the floor and a chill in the air, the smell of dung hovered everywhere
Joseph laid some hay in a feeding trough, but I don’t believe it was very soft
And there was not a single midwife to be found, nothing but this damp, cold, muddy ground
Just a terrified girl and a bone-tired man. Way to go, God, what a marvelous plan!

It wasn’t very pretty, it wasn’t very clean
Not your typical manger scene
It wasn’t very sweet and it wasn’t very nice
But this was the birth of Jesus Christ

So the time was come and the child was born, Mary brought forth her first-born son
We don’t know how much it hurt or how long it took, that part isn’t in the book
But there were no wise men, they were still seeking, the sheep and oxen were not speaking
They didn’t hear no angel wings, Mary just thought about all these things
She kept them in her heart and pondered, I really wonder what she wondered
Could she believe what she had heard, this baby was the living word?
But somehow God saw them through, he helped them to do what they had to do
They only knew a tiny part, and it was just enough not to break their hearts because

It wasn’t very pretty, it wasn’t very clean
Not your typical manger scene
It wasn’t very sweet and it wasn’t very nice
But this was the birth of Jesus Christ

Like nothing we could ever dream, the God of heaven in a manger mean
But this is how he chose to become a man, so way to go, God, what a marvelous plan!

Life isn’t very pretty, it isn’t very clean
We’re just your typical human beings
We’re not very sweet and we’re not very nice
We need someone like Jesus Christ.