“Christmas suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect.”
And before we know it another year is about to pass us by and as the grandest party of the greatest farewell to a gripping year comes to the gates of glory, a lot of memories and a lot of moments pass us by. And yeah, it was another year filled with Celebrations and a time where maybe we momentarily forgot about all of life’s problems and pain. Maybe you got the Christmas you desired, maybe you didn’t.
Maybe it was another Christmas. Another year of hearing the story of a young, mother to be who is turned away at inn after inn and is finally welcomed in a cozy stable to give birth to her special son. We hear the story over and over, yet we walk past the homeless, destroy our environment, and take no effort to reach the poor. Maybe for you to celebrate this year seems somewhat of a tragedy. We see the failures of mankind. The greed. The hate. The dishonesty. The lack of humanity for humanity. How do we fix it?
Perhaps we go to a stable. We sit under the stars with animals. We rest in the hay and scan the sky for miracles. We make the ground sacred. We become caretakers of the wild. We welcome a young pregnant girl. We welcome kings and wise men. We listen for the voices of angels singing. We realize that we have missed a very important message in the Christmas story. It’s not just a story to be heard but one to be lived. Maybe we lost the joy. We lost the part, for all people. We lost the manger. We lost the miracle. In our race for power and wealth, we lost ourselves. To find ourselves again, we must return to what Christmas is, to that baby’s sanctuary. We must find our place in the world created by the divine, not in the chaos that mankind has ruthlessly created. For how can we care about a dying world if we do not share the pain? How do we care about a child starving in our street, if we are eating like a king at our fortified mansions? How do we feel the night’s cold if we never leave our warm den?
It’s time the world saw Christmas and Christ for what it truly is, it is simply love. It is simply a friend. Yes, one can argue we lost it but it’s up to us to find it back and this season and as the new year approaches, if we can find it, it just might change the world. For forgiveness, tolerance, service, charity, and respect comes from Love, that phenomenon what Christmas truly is.
Where Are You Christmas? There You Are!