I hear the frustrations:
1) Independence Day replacing Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas merchandising season.
2) Street carolers avoiding "Christian" songs during the celebration of Christ's birth.
3) Houses that aren't decorated.
4) Real Christmas trees removed from the forest.
5) 11pm Christmas Eve church services.
I am thankful for:
1) Families on tight budgets getting an early start on Christmas presents in July.
2) The celebration of the Christmas season through unexpected song.
3) Delivery of food baskets to homes that cannot afford electric bills for outdoor lights.
4) Planting "bulbed" Christmas pine trees after Christmas.
5) A Pastor willing and able to "work" on Christmas Eve.
As Christmas Day draws near, I am reminded of a passage from a sermon my father delivered (authored years before by another minister) some 40 years ago in a small Presbyterian church in the South:
"A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life."
"He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army, and has no family of his own. He never owns a home, never attends college, and travels no more than 200 miles from the place he is born."
"The tide of popular feelings runs against him, a friend denies him, another betrays him, he is turned over to his enemies, and nailed to a cross between thieves."
"But, as we look back across 2,000 years, we come to realize that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned have, put together, not affected life upon this Earth as much as that one solitary life."
Merry Christmas.
