16th & 17th December, 2004
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Rod in “The Best is Yet to Come” 11/6/04
Photo by Shira Greenburg ©2004 by Broadway.com. Used by Permission
A Thought for Today
While dropping off an unwrapped
children's toy at your local fire station this week, don't forget to
take along some cookies, a box of fruit or a bag of popcorn for the
brave men and women who risk their lives daily in this volatile season
of Christmas Tree and short circuit fires. By the way, just to make
their lives a little easier, have you placed your tree in a pan of
water? Finally, for your own safety, don't forget to turn of the lights
on the tree when you go to bed & while you're out shopping or partying.
A FLIGHT FROM6THE
PAST
ANOTHER SIDE OF CHRISTMAS • 23 December 1998
Christmas is a time of celebration. Bright packages and ropes of pine,
starched red bows and ribbons, eggnog and plum pudding, all promising
we’ll be touched by something extraordinary.
But Christmas is a time of memory as much as celebration. For some it is
memory of loss, intensified because, for all our lives, we’ve seen it as
the season of promise. So much promised by friends and family, so little
given in the rush. Christmas is and can be lonely. A loneliness that
crowds us like no other as we turn inward, farther from reality than at
any other season.
Just once we ought to set about preparing for the downhill run that
nearly always accompanies the tinsel. The only way to do so is to get
outside us and think about the infant in the manger long ago. Not just
remembering His birthday, but remembering the trials and truth that
marked His life and, down these many years, also mark ours. We are
better because He was the best. Throughout His life He carried the
passkeys to His father’s house, then threw them to us from the cross.
Whatever went before, life only started when His life began.
God may have been the architect, but He sent Christ, His only son, to be
the builder of bridges, people to people. He showed us in a thousand
ways that none of us need fear again, that worry is worth nothing,
loneliness is self - indulgence, and death is only a passport to
everlasting life.
This year, as Christmas makes it’s round again, resolve to smile inside
and out. Carry kindness to its farthest edge, compassion still beyond.
In the process you may even come to know yourself and like what you
find. Then, reaching just a little farther through the mists and myths,
maybe even grasp the outstretched hand of God.
- adapted from "An Outstretched Hand", 1980, Revised 1998
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