Growing up, motels were magical places for me. We didn’t have a lot of money, so when one of my sisters and her family moved to Connecticut, we all went into deep mourning. We talked on the phone once a month because of the expense and sent handwritten letters. When summer came, we drove across the country, from southern California all the way to New England. Most nights we stayed in motels and ate in restaurants—two things we almost never did otherwise. Adventure. One week to get there, two weeks there, and one week to get back home.

We had AAA maps guiding us; they suggested possible places to stay along the way. Often we didn’t use their suggestions, choosing instead to find something a little more budget friendly. Sometimes there was a pool in the parking lot. I begged to put coins into the magic fingers machine that made a bed vibrate for ten minutes if we were lucky enough to get a room that had one. I could watch television from bed. The rooms were clean with ready-made beds that we didn’t have to re-make in the morning when we left. The innkeepers were always nice. Sometimes I got a free bottle of Coke and in the morning before we left, those who drove got free coffee.

The worst time was when we would hit a town where we had planned to stay and the rooms in the motels were all taken. The neon signs could say “vacancy,” “no vacancy,” and sometimes just a simple “no.” We sometimes had to keep driving longer than we wanted and pay more than we planned, but eventually we always managed to find a place to stay.

Finding a place to stay whispers thoughts of Christmas. In the story of Christmas, there’s Mary, Joseph and Jesus. All others fade into the background. Sure, other people are there, but their significance dulls in comparison to the Incarnation.

The innkeeper. The shepherds. The wise men from the east. They all factor into the story and are memorable in their own not-so-amazing ways.

Actually, the innkeeper doesn’t show up in the biblical story. He’s just implied in a reference to Mary and Joseph being turned away from shelter. Luke 2:7 ends with “because there was no place for them in the inn.” Somebody had to give them the “no vacancy” message. In those days they did not have little neon signs to inform weary travelers.

Maybe the thought of a mama giving birth in an inn as public as that was more than the innkeeper could handle, or maybe there were just too many people. Or, if it was a distant cousin who turned them away, well, that adds a whole other wrinkle. Rooms for people were on upper floors, whereas animals were relegated to the ground floor. Whatever happened, a person turned them away. And there’s always the traditional cave or barn-like structure where we place our Nativity figures.

Even from the very beginning, Jesus had no home. Bethlehem was an ancestral “home,” but they were just there for the census. And this baby took his first breaths in the manger, not a family home or a room for special guests. Welcome to the world, Jesus, the one where “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matt. 8:20)

When the baby grows up, he tells a story that features another innkeeper.

This innkeeper opens his door to a hated class of man who brings with him an injured man he has rescued.

The hated rescuer says to him, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.” (Luke 10:35b)

The innkeeper takes the wounded man under his wing, into his inn. Well, Jesus doesn’t really that say as he finishes the story, but he instructs the listeners who first heard him tell it, “You go, and do likewise.”

For the most part, our lives are not lived out in hotels and restaurants. Real life is ordinary life, whatever that might mean for each of us. Eventually vacations end; we go home, make our beds, cook our meals, live our lives.

The events of Christmas traditions are not the real Christmas—much like creches on display showing baby, mother, father, animals, magi, shepherds and angels all arranged around the baby Jesus to tell the story. Our houses and traditions do not hold him. They cannot hold him. We cannot contain him.

But he can hold us. Jesus can and does hold us. There is room for us in his inn, and he does not turn us away. The vacancy sign is in us until we pull off the road, and he comes to inhabit every room, every corner—binding wounds, offering food and drink and care, serving and loving lost people like you and me.

He only says to us quite simply and wondrously, “You go, and do likewise.”