Emmanuel

A Happy First Day of December.

I realized last night, as I sat up thinking, that as an adult, Christmas has become a very different thing than it was when I was a child. Mostly, the rush of the month - as an adult, December is the year end month for work, rushing to get everything taken care of and everyone goes out on vacation. Add to this that now more than ever, Christmas is the "uncelebrated" holiday season at places of employment, a thing of commercialism and occasional holiday trappings - but not of religion, oddly enough the thing for which the holiday was created (bosh on the idea of Saturnalia. Yes, the Christians adopted it but no, it has not been celebrated for what - 1700 years?)

But in reality, isn't that a microcosm of the reason for Christmas? Emmanuel, God with Us, came into a world in the midst of it: an occupied country, a very young mother and father on their way for a government accounting, in the middle of a trip somewhere else. It was not the time per se that made the celebration, but what occurred during that time that made it remarkable.

Do we have that Emmanuel experience now? If you're a believer, God is with you right now through His Son and His Spirit, even in the ordinariness of our lives. Do we act and believe like that - or do we let the crush of life interfere with it the same way we let it do with Christmas?

We live in hope, even as the Israelites live in hope: they from the back end looking forward, we also from the front end looking forward to Christ's second appearing. May the thought of God with Us change us every day, but especially in this season set aside for Him.