Feeling you don't matter this Christmas? Look at this story

I catch myself doing it constantly: walking through town, glancing at someone, and in half a second, I’ve written their entire biography. Missing teeth = hard living. Nice car = they’ve got it together. Fake lashes = high maintenance. Blue hair + septum piercing =  this person probably includes pronouns in their Twitter bio.

We’re ruthless little judges, many of us (though most of you are probably smart enough not to admit this publicly). And the daunting part is knowing the same thing is happening to me.

I live in a double-wide. I don’t live high off the hog. I never get my hair done, rarely wear makeup, and sometimes I wonder what people think of me as I deliver groceries to their million-dollar homes. I’m profoundly grateful for the life I have now, a life filled with peace and real love and grace and forgiveness. But it’s also a life still shaped by the long-term consequences of decisions made decades ago.

Usually, I honestly don’t care what people think, which has its perks when you’re doing work that tends to make people hate you. But lately, as middle age settles in and the anonymity of housewifery wraps around my days, I’ve felt that quiet ache surface — the desire most people have: to matter. Not to be impressive, just to be seen. To count for something in a world that scrolls past.

This morning, that ache ran headfirst into the nativity, and it leveled me.

Only Luke gives us the gritty, tactile details of Christ’s birth — the manger, the shepherds, the night sky ablaze with angels. Matthew also begins his account at the start of Jesus’ life, focusing on the visit of the Magi, King Herod’s plot, and the flight to Egypt, but it is Luke who draws us closest to the radical humility of that first night.

And the cast of characters Luke highlights is no accident. The King of Kings steps down from glory to be born to a poor couple and laid in a feeding trough. God enters the world not among the polished and powerful but among the small, the low, the ordinary.

But what strikes me most is who gets the first announcement. Not the educated. Not the wealthy. Not the religious elite. Not the think-tank scholars or social climbers or people with curated reputations.

Shepherds. The people no one took seriously. Men whose clothes were stained, whose hands were cracked, who lived on the fringes of society. The ones the religious elite dismissed as unclean, the merchants suspected of every missing lamb, the kind of men no courtroom or temple council would ever take seriously. And Heaven exploded for them. Angels lit up the night sky for them. God entrusted the first public proclamation of the Messiah to them.

Because this is what God does. He chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. The low things to shame the lofty. The overlooked things to reveal what actually matters.

If the nativity happened today, the angels wouldn’t descend on CEOs or influencers or people with glossy success stories, though His gift is obviously for them, too. They’d show up for the guy driving a security truck through an empty Walmart parking lot at 3 a.m. They’d show up for the waitress at the truck stop pulling double shifts to keep her grandkids housed. They’d show up for all the people who feel invisible, unremarkable, or dismissed, people who wonder if anyone sees them at all.

God measures worth differently than we do. We rank people by what’s visible: bank accounts, titles, waistlines, follower counts, the whiteness of their smile.

He looks past all of that and sees the heart that keeps choosing faithfulness when no one is watching, the hands that serve without posting about it, the life that stays steady in the long, quiet middle when the applause has moved on.

The shepherds are the proof.

The men everyone else treated as unclean, unreliable, and unimportant became the first witnesses of the Messiah. The religious establishment of that day is mostly forgotten. Herod’s palace is a ruin. The priests who thought they were the guardians of God’s glory are nameless footnotes.

But every December, in every corner of the world, those shepherds are remembered. Their names may be lost, but their place in the story is secure. Because God chose them, honored them, and entrusted them with the announcement that changed everything.

That is still how He works. Your ordinary days, your hidden struggles, your small obediences, they are not invisible to Him. They are precious. They are the very stuff He delights to use, to notice, to crown with eternal weight. In the Kingdom of God, the overlooked are the ones He lifts up.

The oft forgotten are the ones He remembers forever. And that, dear reader, includes you. It includes me, too.

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.