a cozy holiday



            I grew up listening to or reading Luke 2 at Christmas time. It is the story of events surrounding the birth of Jesus. It is certainly beloved and meaningful to me. Christmas time just gives me that cozy feeling; basking in the glow of the lights from the tree, sharing love and laughter with family and friends, feeling especially pleased and eager to see the face of a loved one when she opens my idea of the perfect gift.  I usually get more pumped about Christmas than I do about Easter and I started considering that. I think it is because when Easter rolls around I come face to face with my sins and their consequences on Good Friday. None of us enjoy being confronted by our wrongs.

            It occurs to me, however, that even though the pain of the cross isn’t as obvious on Christmas and we see Jesus as a beautiful baby boy, there is confrontation. I must confront the fact that Jesus had to leave paradise and take on human form, for me. Perhaps you have been at a celebration of some kind and had to leave early for a mundane reason. Remember your disappointment? I imagine (were it not for his love for us) Jesus might have experienced a similar but magnified disappointment; to leave the realms of paradise and be constrained by a human body, born of a virgin, into a humble family and sleeping in a feeding trough, wow. Jesus did that for you and me, not grudgingly but lovingly. He really is the best Christmas present we will ever receive.



Luke 2: 6-7:   “While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.”


Posted by

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 13, 2011 at 9:14 AM

    Love your post today because in the past with Mary and Melissa we also read Luke before opening gifts to help us remember Jesus and His gift to us. Thanks Jody and may you and your family be blessed and receive all of God's grace this be blessed season. Pax Carl

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How are you?

Image
            When I wake, one of the first things I do is say, “Good morning God!” Some days are more enthusiastic than others. When I greet another human being, I usually follow that greeting with, “how are you?” This morning it occurred to me that I don’t ask God how he is. I have been contemplating this idea, how are you God? Obviously, given his attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience it is easy to follow the train of thought that he has everything in check. Despite that; I think of him in human terms and I can’t help but feel he is; not mad but disappointed (cringe). When he looks at creation, like a parent gazing on the wreckage of a kid’s toy room, wouldn’t there be disappointment?             As I contemplated that, my meandering mind led me to consider guilt. The guilt that leads to the disappointment of others. Every culture I have known lays claim to guilt; Lutheran guilt, Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, Italian guilt and so on. Truth be told, we’re all guil
Read more

Out of the Mouth

Image
  Genesis 3:14 “God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ This is what you are to say to the Israelites: “I Am has sent me to you.”             I feel the need to make a disclaimer statement up front as I can see what I will write in these next few sentences could be misconstrued. This writing is not claiming that man is God although I will say, that if you have claimed the Holy Spirit lives in you, that identifies that God is in you too.             How many times a day do you use the phrase “I am…”? Probably much more than you or I realize. This is how God identified Himself to Moses. “I AM who I AM” We often refer to God as the great I AM, which He is. Going back to how often we use the phrase, for myself those two words are often followed with denigrating words like; so stupid, so foolish, so dumb, so angry, so hurt, so fill in the blank. What if each time we thought about those two words and how we identify ourselves we replaced “I AM” with “God is” most of us (I make this assumptio
Read more

Masterpiece

Image
              As a young person, I was fond of painting, not great at it but reasonable. I set it aside when I fell in love and got married. In these days of isolation I needed to find some other ways to occupy myself other than baking and decided to get back to my paint brushes.   To get used to handling the brushes again I got myself a paint by number,             If you have never tried one of these let me give you a little insight. You receive a canvas with an image divided up into numbered areas and little pots of paint with corresponding numbers. Then you begin a sort of scavenger hunt trying to fill in all the spots of a particular number. Sounds simple enough, however some of these areas are so tiny they are easily overlooked. The tiny spots are important though, they give that little flourish that can draw the eye or round out an object.             Why do I tell you about this? As I dove into this project, a great life analogy was revealed to me and I do love a good word
Read more