THE GIFT

Love came down for us on that first Christmas Day.  He took on a human body, that of an infant and became one of us.  He was sent to us as the perfect Gift to mankind.  He was the promised Messiah, Jesus, yet well into the night in the coldest time of the year, He was born into poverty.  The place, a cave, was more suitable for beasts rather than for the King of kings.  There are none to clamor around Him, just the stable animals to lend a bit of warmth to the Infant God.  His mother, humble and pure, and his father, poor and tired were beside him in adoration.

He had been expected for forty centuries.   Sacred scriptures clearly prophesy the time and place of His birth, yet the world was silent and no one knew of His arrival.  There were shepherds watching their flock, who were allerted by Heavenly messengers of the child's birth.  They came to see, to adore, to touch their Savior.

This Gift for us came with no requirements, no expectations from us,  just love.  So we take our Gift and celebrate.  We celebrate the birth of a baby born to die.  We celebrate the King who was born in a shabby smelly barn, with visitors with sheep dung on their feet.  We celebrate because we did nothing to deserve this Gift, but we all received.  The shabbiness of this setting reminds us of the other shabby dirty place Jesus chooses every day to be born, the human heart; a place more filthy and cold than any stable.  Celebrate? you say.  Yes, most heartily we celebrate amidst the dung of the stable, which is of course, the refuse of our world.  We celebrate because He came to change the world and all of its ugliness.

How many will accept this most precious Gift?  How many will close their eyes and toss it away?  How many today do not believe because they do not see?  Hidden from our human eyes He is ever present.  Yet your faith enables your soul to "see" Him, hear Him, and embrace Him.

If Christmas means anything to you, then it must mean everything.  It is a time of blessed relief at finally seeing God's promises in ONE PERSON.  Let us all gather around the stable of the Lord and open our Gift, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, to be shared with all the world.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!