Amy Grant recorded “My Grown-up Christmas List” for her “Home For Christmas” album. The lyrics imagine an adult going back to Santa with a different perspective on what matters most in life. Instead of material things the writer now asks for good things for others. I love the sentiment of the song. No more lives torn apartThat wars would never startAnd time would heal all heartsEveryone would have a friendAnd right would always winAnd love would never endThis is my grown-up Christmas list I thought about my “grown-up” Christmas list this week. I would love for all of the things in the lyrics above to come true. But I have lived enough to know they will not. Everyday lives are torn apart. Wars start too frequently. Time does not heal every heart. Some who are reading this are lonely. Right seems to lose way too often and love ends for many. So what could I wish for that would be available for all?
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One of my favorite Christmas stories happened during the horrors of war. The Christmas carol “Silent Night” was actually responsible for a wartime Christmas truce. The year was 1914 and soldiers were having to spend Christmas Eve night on the World War I battlefields of Belgium. After only four months of fighting, more than a million men had already perished in the bloody conflict. The bodies of dead soldiers were scattered between the trenches. Enemy troops were dug-in so close that they could easily exchange shouts. On December 24, 1914, in the middle of a freezing battlefield in France, a miracle happened. The British troops watched in amazement as candle-lit Christmas trees began to appear above the German trenches. The glowing trees soon appeared along the length of the German front. Henry Williamson, a young soldier with the London Regiment wrote in his diary: “From the German parapet, a rich baritone voice had begun to sing a song I remembered my German nurse singing to me…. The grave and tender voice rose
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One of my contributions with these modest little musings is to continually ask the tough questions. While listening to “Away in a Manger” my inquiring mind kicked in. You likely know verse three of the song. The cattle are lowingThe poor Baby wakesBut little Lord JesusNo crying He makes As I listened an important series of difficult and probing inquiries popped into my head. I can’t answer the last question but I can help with the others. Lowing is defined at dictionary.com as “the characteristic sound uttered by cattle; a moo”. So little baby Jesus was awakened by the characteristic sound uttered by a cow. That would not have flowed well in the lyric so I understand using lowing. The next part of the song is disturbing to those of us who are or have been parents. If any of the babies who grew up in our household were awakened by cattle lowing they would be squalling (defined as “the characteristic sound uttered by a ticked off baby; a scream”).
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Every follower of Jesus is offered the gifts of grace without any strings (or ribbons) attached. All of us have full access to these gifts. Paul writes that we are brought into right relationship with God entirely as a gift of His radical and amazing love. When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. He generously poured out the Spirit upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior. Because of his grace he made us right in his sight and gave us confidence that we will inherit eternal life. Titus 3:5-7, NLT Grace is the best deal ever offered and yet we often resist opening this gift from our Lord. We can’t believe it is true. We fear it can’t be possible that we can be
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Theodore Roosevelt shared great wisdom when he said that “comparison is the thief of joy”. Losing joy is what inevitably happens when you play the no win game of comparisons. We all do it and comparisons are poison to the soul. We either compare to someone doing better than us and feel downcast or compare ourselves to someone failing and feel better. Sometimes we even secretly wish they would fail so we can feel better about our own efforts. In Psalm 139 we read how God uniquely wove our DNA together to create the one and only me and the one and only you. He knew us before we were formed and He has ordained our days. Paul’s message to the Ephesians gets a fresh take in The Message. It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his
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Thomas Jefferson is an enigma for many. Political enemies in his day accused him of being an atheist yet he started the statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom with the phrase, “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” He certainly would not have been invited to speak at an evangelical conference to share his view that most clergymen are “soothsayers and necromancers.” You likely have a bigger brain than I do but I will confess that I had to look up necromancers. It literally means one who interrogates the dead. Okay. Not sure what church Jefferson was frequenting. Jefferson believed that Bible needed to be fixed. He took out his scissors and cut out the parts of the Bible that he didn’t believe. He excised the virgin birth, all of the miracles and the Resurrection. He cobbled together a book he titled “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth”. His clippers removed every miracle while leaving teachings about helping the needy
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One of my favorite Peanuts comic strips features Charlie Brown’s sister Sally struggling to spread frozen butter on her toast. Finally she exclaims, “Nobody told me life was going to be this hard!” I can understand Sally’s frustration. Life is hard. The Bible is very clear that life will be a journey of struggling to spread frozen butter and worse (that is a paraphrase). Much worse. I am going through one of those frozen butter times right now but I have come to understand that those times are part of the journey. God has given us a wonderful gift that we too often leave unwrapped. The gift of laughter. The following excerpt is from my sporadically selling book “Bring’em Back Alive – A Healing Plan for those Wounded by the Church.” I believe a sense of humor is one of God’s gifts to help get us to the finish line. One of the things I learned from writing When Bad Christians Happen to Good People is well stated by humorist Dave
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