Christmas Gift

It is just after midnight and Christmas Eve has given way to the earliest moments of Christmas morning. The house is quiet and the dog has finally stopped crying. I am listening to the Chieftians sing the Christmas song Don Oiche Ud mBethiel and Burgess Meredith is narrating. It is moving. Especially in this silence.

Worship last night was again quite wonderful. In fact, I would contend that it was the best service The Wheatland Mission has had to date. (Saying this betrays a certain hypocrisy within me that views the weekend service as the point of our church rather than an expression of our life.) We sang Christmas songs, read the Christmas story (Moser did great), and we lit candles after sharing in communion. It was a wonderful way to prepare our hearts for Christ's coming ... again.

Slowly, but surely, we are shedding the burden of carrying the story of the world and carefully picking up the story of Christ in order that we might tell it as we should. Bless our hearts, our heads and our tongues as we speak it clearly. The first steps, however, are reclaiming the calendar for Christ. We don't seek to reclaim it as some reaction to the supposed "war on Christmas" but in response to our realization that we are shaped by the world in ways that we are not yet aware. We blithely begin to live in, and to tell, the world's story rather than allowing ourselves to be shaped by Christ's story and, in turn, telling that story. The calendar and a renewed sense of Christian time is one way to fight back against our lulled into indifference.