I've been too tired and busy to update this blog much in the past few weeks, so I apologize for the dearth of content. As many of you know, I work in a grocery store, so this is one of the busiest times of the year for me, and continues until after the New Year.
So let me take this moment to wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas! Enjoy the holiday with friends and family, enjoy the giving and receiving of gifts, and keep in your mind and heart what Christmas is all about: its a celebration of the moment our Lord and Creator humbled himself and entered our world as a helpless baby, lying on a bed of straw, wrapped in a blanket.
As you busy yourself putting away the gifts and decorations, cleaning up the wrapping paper, and setting out to the mall to get what you really wanted, and as you gratefully sigh at the end of another Christmas season, remember that that first Christmas was not just a day that came and went, even though the shepherds returned to their flocks and the Wise Men returned to the east. It was merely a beginning, the first step in a process of Forgiveness and Salvation that would reach fulfilment thirty-three years later on a bloody cross. Yet there is even a hint in the Christmas story of this ending by the gifts given to the newborn babe: frankincense and myrrh were often used in funerals and preparation of the dead for burial.
So, even as we remember the wonder of a baby in a manger, don't lose sight of the sacrifice made on the cross, and the triumph of the empty tomb.
If you're travelling this Christmas (as I am), be safe. Merry Christmas, and God Bless.
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