I just got back from being on holidays - my wife and I and two friends spent some time in Mexico. While we were there we met and chatted with a really likeable guy named Ellio. Ellio worked at the place where we stayed selling massages on the beach and every day he would wander around trying to convince people that their vacation was incomplete unless they had a 50 minute massage.
During the Christmas Break we had a warm spell that lasted for a couple of days where I live. Prior to this reprieve from the cold, what I didn’t know was that my downspout leading from my garage had clogged full of leaves (apparently good home owners check this during the fall) and had slowed the flow of water. As the weather got colder, the backlog of water froze in my eaves.
For a lot of years I went on record as being somebody who hated Christmas. Hated is probably too strong a word (but then again I like to get reactions out of people, so I probably used it for that reason alone) because I really do love Christmas - at least with regards to what it really is all about. I don’t even really dislike all of the cultural trappings of Christmas (even though most of them we could definitely do without) - I like spending time with family, I like giving gifts and even though publicly I will deny this, I don’t even mind singing Christmas carols from time to time.
At the church where I work, we have been walking through the Gospels (in as chronological a way as we can) in an effort to just spend some time watching and listening to Jesus. As people who call ourselves followers of Jesus, the things He taught and the things that were (and are) close to His heart also ought to be close to ours.
This is largely coming out of personal experience and a thought that I’ve been cultivating the last couple of days and even taught at youth this week. It is really just the flip side of my entry back in June entitled “When Jesus Wants to Rebuild Our Core” but it has become a living example in the midst of the congregation I worship with.
