Christmas Tinsel

Merry Christmas and I hope you are having a fun and relaxing day. With over 12" of snow and more on the way here in Omaha, it is great to be "forced" to relax and take it easy. I don't know if that says more about the busyness of Christmas or that it is hard to relax and lounge around without having a good excuse. I guess that is for another blog.

earlier this month I read an editorial by Rod Dreher that got me thinking about Christmas and how we experience the day. In the column, Rod had done a review of "Tinsel."

Tinsel was written by Hank Stuever and examines what Christmas means to contemporary Americans through the eyes of three families in Frisco, Texas. Stuever says he wrote the book to explore the question: "Who are we now that we live in this world where so many people for so long had unlimited access to just about anything they wanted."

Each family observed in Tinsel was obsessed in making their Christmas unique and meaningful. In a nut shell, Tinsel tells how they failed in their Christmas mission.

Rod Dreher summarizes the book with this personal observation.

"It's good to feast joyfully at Christmas. But if you never fast, if you don't know the meaning of enough, feasting can't help being disordered and gross. When our wealth makes every day a holiday, how do you find the humility, stillness and gratitude required to live Christmas in the proper spirit? Odd, but one of the most modest yet meaningful Christmases I ever spent was in secular Holland, far from the US Christmas-industrial complex."

I pray that you will feast joyfully at Christmas with humility, joy, stillness and gratitude for God sending His Son to be born, so we might have true life in Him.

Only through Incarnation

I'm working on a Christmas message for the 20th. Been doing some reading and studying about the birth of Christ and came across this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge:

"As man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone He would not.
Incarnate, He could and did."

May Christmas and the incarnation, or as we humans say "birth" of Jesus Christ be real and fill you with joy.

Silence is....

....an unwelcome guest? Think about the last time you were at a store, health club or restaurant and there was no background music playing. In those situations, I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong, but it just felt weird.

....a welcomed friend? Think about a time when you had had a very busy, noisy day. Then think of how nice it was to have silence. That silence could help you breathe and relax. That silence could also help you think through what next steps needed to be taken.

....from God. Psalm 46.10 "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." I can't help but see a correlation between being still [silence] AND knowing God along with the opportunity to see God exalted. Could it be that if you aren't silent, you won't know and see God exalted?

Just a thought.