thinking

It's Christmas night and I'm exhausted, but I don't want the day to pass me by without really grasping the reality of it. Most of our holidays have become over commercialized... people more concerned with buying cards and gifts than appreciating the true meaning behind the holiday. Christmas is no different... we rush around to send Christmas cards, decorate the house, buy gifts, attend the Christmas parties, pretend to be Santa for the kids... it's every where.

The funny thing is, Christmas started in something resembling more like a stable when a virgin teenage girl had a baby. There was no Santa, no house decorations, no cards or reindeer. Some of our Christmas traditions started with thoughts of Christianity, but they've been so distorted some of us don't even know what Christmas really means. Christmas is the day we celebrate Jesus' birth. The part that is hard to understand (or maybe believe) is Jesus is God's son but came to earth with a greater plan that would ultimately be fulfilled through Easter. No one really expected God's son to come through a poor teenager in a barn, but humans screw up and God was gracious enough to send his Son to cover up for us... (an understatement). Either way I want to remember why I woke up at the butt crack of dawn to open presents and spent the day with family chaos rather than sitting in my office staring at a computer all day.

Discovering Christmas

A man hated church, but he loved ducks. But his ducks were really dumb ducks. They wouldn't go south when winter came. He fretted as each day got colder, and they weaker. He tried to put grain down leading into his barn, where they would be safe, but they wouldn't have any of it. He left the doors open at night, and put lights on inside, and they didn't even notice. It grew colder as the days went by, and the duck lover pondered and thought. He played music inside. He put Fox decoys all around outside. In frustration, he finally tried to herd them into his barn, but the more he waved and shouted, the more afraid the dumb ducks got, and fled further away from the warmth and the food their loving duck shepherd was offering them.
Our poor duck shepherd fell to his knees sobbing, knowing these ducks would soon die now, and nothing he could do would help them- nothing, because he was unfathomable to them, and they feared him. He thought, "If only I could be one of them, I could show them, communicate to them, and they would accept me, and not be afraid of me, and I could bring them to safety, warmth, shelter- to a place I myself have prepared for them. Just then he heard the bells for Christmas eve services, and realized for the first time what that babe in Bethlehem was all about...

Sidenote... babble about prayer...
I think about prayer a lot. Someone gets sick and we ask for prayer. Sometimes we pray for our food before we eat it. Occasionally we are hit with an emergency and throw up a prayer out of desperation. I'm not always sure how effective my prayers are, but I have to trust that they're being heard. Unfortunately the examples of prayer that we put out there aren't always good ones. In a lot of churches, prayer is a speech with a lot of churchy words like "redemption" and "wherefore shall" and "calvary" that are not found in our typical conversation. I think prayer is a way to communicate with God... so it doesn't have to be wordy or churchy or stiff... I don't think God's impressed by it. Prayer is like calling my best friend to talk... or maybe writing a letter is easier than talking... there are no rules... I just think it should be real...