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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99

A Thought for Today

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Dear Rod, The sentiments you expressed last year during the Christmas season touched me greatly. I especially liked “Another Side of Christmas.” Please reprint it to help remind all of us of what we should be celebrating this weekend. Kindest regards, Enid Knight.

ANOTHER SIDE OF CHRISTMAS
12 December, 1998   

Christmas is a time of celebration. Bright packages and ropes of pine, starched red bows and ribbons, eggnog and plum pudding, all promising we’ll be touched by something extraordinary.

But Christmas is a time of memory as much as celebration. For some it is memory of loss, intensified because, for all our lives, we’ve seen it as the season of promise. So much promised by friends and family, so little given in the rush. Christmas is and can be lonely. A loneliness that crowds us like no other as we turn inward, farther from reality than at any other season.

Just once we ought to set about preparing for the downhill run that nearly always accompanies the tinsel. The only way to do so is to get outside us and think about the infant in the manger long ago. Not just remembering His birthday, but remembering the trials and truth that marked His life and, down these many years, also mark ours. We are better because He was the best. Throughout His life He carried the passkeys to His father’s house, then threw them to us from the cross. Whatever went before, life only started when His life began.

God may have been the architect, but He sent Christ, His only son, to be the builder of bridges, people to people. He showed us in a thousand ways that none of us need fear again, that worry is worth nothing, loneliness is self - indulgence, and death is only a passport to everlasting life.

This year, as Christmas makes it’s round again, resolve to smile inside and out. Carry kindness to its farthest edge, compassion still beyond. In the process you may even come to know yourself and like what you find. Then, reaching just a little farther through the mists and myths, maybe even grasp the outstretched hand of God.

- adapted from "An Outstretched Hand", 1980, 1998 • First published 12/23/98

I hope your weekend has given you strength and dedication for the Christmas week ahead. See you tomorrow with some letters and answers. Sleep Warm

                                - 12/18/99 RM

A MAN