It’s the final week of advent.
On this Monday, I am thinking of some friends
in our fellowship who have lost a loved one – a grandmother – just these few
days before Christmas.
When I was 14, just 2 weeks before Christmas, I
walked into my house after delivering the morning papers in my small town. Standing in the kitchen was my mother, and
she was crying. She looked at me and
said, “Grandma died this morning”. I
wept.
That Christmas presents were opened and some of
them were from Grandma who had knitted and sewn presents for her family all
Fall long. It was a Christmas I’ve never
forgotten. Years later I can picture the
solemnness of receiving gifts as they were passed out. Tears flowed instead of grin to grin smiles
and exclamations.
I read this story this morning about the poet
Robert Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1863, as
the American Civil War was dragging on, Longfellow’s son joined the army
against his father’s wishes and was critically injured. On Christmas Day that
year, as church bells announced the arrival of another Christmas, Longfellow
picked up his pen and began to write, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
The poem begins pleasantly, lyrically, but then
takes a dark turn. “Accursed” cannons “thundered,” mocking the message of
peace. By the fifth and sixth verses, Longfellow’s desolation is nearly
complete. “It was as if an earthquake rent the hearth-stones of a continent,”
he wrote. The poet nearly gave up: “And in despair I bowed my head; ‘There is
no peace on earth,’ I said.”
But then, from the depths of that bleak Christmas
day, Longfellow heard the irrepressible sound of hope. And he wrote this
seventh stanza.
Then pealed the bells more loud and
deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep! The wrong shall fail, the right
prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men!”
The war raged on and so did memories of his
personal tragedies, but it could not stop Christmas. The Messiah is born! He
promises, “I am making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5).
My friends, we celebrate family and life on most
Christmas days, but occasionally we have to remind ourselves of the hope of the
Gospel – that all things will be made NEW because the one who came at
Christmas, will come again and all things will be made NEW.
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