On Christmas

I love Christmas Eve. It very well could take 1st prize in a favorite-day-of-the-year contest. I think I love it more than Christmas Day itself. I guess I feel a certain connection to the actual Incarnation on Christmas Eve. When the sun goes down and darkness blankets the earth (or half of it anyway) in my mind I am taken back to the defining event in History: God steps into the world. All of the stories of my youth surrounding the Christ event rush back into my mind in vivid detail and color, sight and sound. I'm taken back to my own son's birth, wondering at the similarity, yet vast difference, between Elijah and the birth of Jesus. There is a silence on Christmas Eve, a peace that settles over everyone. For one instant it seems the whole world stops, stands still, and wonders at the miracle of the Incarnation. In that silence I find hope: the hope that I won't always be as I am, that somehow I can be different, that something about that birth changed everything for me and continues to change everything about me. Maybe that's why I love it so much: because deep down, because of the Incarnation, I know I don't have to remain as I am anymore.

Merry Christmas to each and every one of you.

Take time to wonder.

shalom, matt