December 25, 1760, continued

Luke’s voice echoed throughout the sanctuary. People stared at him, faces horrified. Some grumbled. Others cried out, “Blasphemy!” (whatever that meant). His mother’s face reddened. His father frowned down at him. He stood and hauled Luke out of the building and dragged him far away. He stopped along the road and slapped the boy’s face with his powerful hand. Through the stinging pain, over his bawling, his father said, “What did you mean by that terrible outburst?”

“Th-the baby! People giving him things for his birthday. It’s me. But why doesn’t he have nice clothes, and why are they in that shack with those animals and not home in their mansion? And where are all his brothers and sisters?”

His father stared at him. “You think Christmas is all about you? That baby isn’t you. It’s Jesus. It’s Christ’s birthday, not just yours. Christmas is all about him!”

Luke’s jaw dropped. “B-but…” He had heard about Jesus on many a Sunday—never dreaming that Jesus was a baby in a feed trough in a stable. “It’s my birthday!” he wailed. “Nobody else can have it!”

His father clapped a hand over Luke’s mouth. He turned him over, pulled his breeches down, exposing his bare bottom to the freezing air, and spanked him. “You disgrace me!” he said above his crying. “Do you want the wrath of God to fall on us all?”

“What?” Luke sobbed.

His father yanked his breeches back up and turned him around. “You should know better by now. It’s because you share his birthday that we named you Lucas, meaning ‘light’—for the star that shone over the stable where he was born.”

His very name, as well as his birthday, placed him in the shadow of another child, who had almost nothing? Luke shook his head. If he was beneath such a poor child, was he himself nothing? He stood in the snow, shattering inside as the chill in his feet crept up toward his heart.

His father did nothing to wipe his tears. “You’re meant to follow him. We believe you will be a great Christian leader someday.”

Never, Luke thought. I’ll never follow that poor baby in that poor little family. They all lied to me. He’s the nobody, not  me.

Luke wanted to run away, but his father held him firmly. He bit back the angry words in his heart. He wasn’t about to suffer the wrath of his parents, the church, and God. He was sure he could hear God laughing at him, like one of his elder brothers after playing a cruel joke on him… but this cruelty he could neither forget nor forgive.

His father took him home on foot, clearly ashamed to bring this son back into the church.

A deep, solemn shadow hung over the rest of Luke’s fifth birthday. It settled into his soul. He held back tears as others received presents because they celebrated someone else’s birthday and he had no special day just for him.

Before bestowing his gifts, his mother wiped away a tear from her eye and his father said, “Promise you will be quiet in God’s house from now on.” Head lowered, Luke peered up through the wavy brown hair on his forehead. He shuddered. “Yes.” Something in him died. And something new awoke: determination to fight this hateful God… in secret.

As night shadows crept in, Luke sat before the kitchen fire warming his toes. But nothing warmed his frozen heart. No birthday—no day from then on—could ever be the same.