Luke 2:1-5: in context

Luke sets the birth of Jesus against the largest possible backdrop. In those days, he writes, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be registered. The master of the known world signs an order, and the entire empire begins to move, everyone traveling to his ancestral town to be counted for the tax rolls. It is an act of imperial bookkeeping, cold and vast, the machinery of an empire flexing its reach. Augustus is counting his world; he has no idea he is doing anything else.

And under that grand decree, a small thing happens that the emperor will never know about. A carpenter named Joseph, of the house of David, has to leave Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem, the town of David, to register, and he takes with him Mary, his betrothed, who is heavily pregnant. Centuries earlier a prophet had said the ruler of Israel would come out of Bethlehem, that little town, and now the entire apparatus of Rome has been set in motion, unknowingly, to move one poor couple the ninety miles required to put the birth exactly where it was foretold. Caesar thinks he is running the world. He is, without the least awareness of it, an errand boy for a prophecy, delivering a pregnant girl to the right village. The biggest lever in the world turns, and it turns to carry the lowest and least to their appointed place.

Caesar's decree, meant to count and tax an empire, quietly carried one couple to the town where prophecy said the child must be born. What large forces beyond my control, that seem to have nothing to do with me, might God be using to move me exactly where I need to be?