I haven’t logged onto WordPress in a while… so I don’t know if the falling snow on the screen is new for Christmas Eve or if it’s just been an all-December sort of thing. It’s pretty darn cool.. seeing as it’ll be all the snow I get for Christmas. I’m not too disappointed over the lack of a white Christmas, mostly because back in late November while I was still at school, we had a good amount of snow. MORE snow than Pittsburgh’s had. More snow in TN than PA? That’s crazy. Awesome.
But anyways… here I am, Christmas Eve. All is quiet in the house, almost. Carol of the Bells is playing, and I’ve got the taste of fresh gingerbread men on my tongue. Everything is so quiet. Makes me wonder what it was like back on the night Christ was born. Sure, it wasn’t December 25th, but even still. I had a discussion about silence in the car coming home from my churches Christmas Eve service. Though, it wasn’t so much about silence as much as it was about calm and quiet, and how Christmas music should supposedly reflect that. But, I wondered: was the atmosphere around Jesus when he was born REALLY quiet? He was born into the world in a stable… animals… they’re not very quiet. The census was taking place, so who knows what kinda noise was going on outside. I suppose that’s just the obvious things. I don’t know… it was just something that struck me. Jesus certainly wasn’t born into a quiet, peaceful world. The world He was born into was rank with sin and power struggles.. evil. How much worse is it now? I don’t want to imagine.. however, I think it’s important to consider where the world is these days, consider what Christ came down to save us from, no?
Yeah, see.. typically I’m not really one of those people who enjoy overly cliched things like Christmas blog posts reminding people of the Christmas story, sayings that get passed around all the time without meaning. I feel kind of awful about it sometimes, the fact that I find it really difficult to appreciate the Christmas Story for what it is. This year it’s been a little easier because God’s been working in my heart, but in years past, it was all same-old, same-old. One of the reasons I think this year is the fact that I’ve stumbled across multiple passages in Scriptures that point back to Christ’s birth and humbling. They aren’t direct lines connecting them solidly, but when you get to thinking about them, there’s some interesting parallels.
So, in speaking about in interesting, not-exactly-connected parallels (wait… parallels aren’t connected in the first place, if they are truly parallel.. what am I thinking?!) I found a verse that stuck out to me particularly in my daily Proverbs reading. I took up a challenge at the beginning of the month that puts forward the challenge of reading a chapter each day of the month, in correspondence with the day… 3rd of December, 3rd chapter in Proverbs.. and so on. Anyways, there was a verse in Ch. 16 that I found to be particularly interesting:
“ It is better to be humble in spirit with the lowly
Than to divide the spoil with the proud.” (Proverbs 16:19)
Alrighty… so.. how exactly does this verse have any parallels with the christmas story? Well… maybe not anything direct, but humility… that’s a huge thing that’s been weighing on my mind recently, especially in light of Christmas. See, Jesus was born in the most humble of situations.. a stable, with parents who were poor and hadn’t really been able to secure a place of their own in the midst of the busyness of the census and such; they weren’t even married (technically.. sorta, according to Jewish culture, but still) when Jesus was conceived, they were in strange place to begin with.. usually the birth of a child happens surrounded by family and friends. Jesus was the King, yet… all this? Jesus’ ministry was with the needy and the poor and sick, he chose to leave His glory and submit himself to some horrible stuff. Anyways, I just thought that it was interesting how throughout Proverbs there’s so many blessings that come with humility and having a humble spirit, how even Christ Himself came to earth in the most humble of conditions in order to minister to US… the humans who so often choose to “divide spoil with the proud.” Not just minister to us but to SAVE us, rescue us from being doomed to being lost in the dark. For eternity. Only He could bridge the gap between God and the human race. This year, there’s something about this fact that really strikes my heart… so I wanted to share. I KNOW how it is with Christmas blog posts, and remembering the Christmas Story… it all is just recycled from the years past… but that doesn’t make it any less true. Don’t let yourself get “vaccinated” against the power of the impact of Christ’s sacrifice for you… it’s important to remember, but takes branches out from the normal verses… look for testimony of Christ’s sacrifice in other parts of scripture to make it fresh.
Have a blessed Christmas.
