Dear Friends,
Welcome to 2010! I hope you have had a good Christmas and are not feeling too hung over from all the parties and the amount of food and drink consumed!! Or alternatively I do hope that you have been able to stay focused and positive even if you have not felt quite that way whilst all around you are making merry. Coming back down to earth with a bump makes me wonder just how those shepherds felt after they had left Bethlehem and gone back to their sheep. Did they dance around the sheepfold and then go off and tell their families about the angels they’d seen and the baby they had visited?
Or have you ever wondered how the Magi, however many of them there were, felt sneaking off around Jerusalem to avoid going back to Herod. Did they take with them a feeling of new beginnings, of a new time on earth? And what happened to all the presents that they gave to Jesus, all the Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh?
I’ve often wondered if Mary and Joseph sold the gifts to fund their flight into Egypt or maybe to help set up a carpenters business in Nazareth. We have no idea what happened to the gifts and nothing that was recorded in the bible of those events gives us any information.
I wonder what will happen to the gifts we have both given and received this Christmas. Will they be stuck in the back of a cupboard and forgotten about or were they gifts that will prove useful and enjoyable for a long time to come. Which ever is the case, in a few weeks or months time they will be forgotten about in our hectic daily lives.
The only present we really need to remember and treasure each and every day is the one true one which is celebrated at Christmas every year, the gift of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. As we start a new year we need to remind ourselves that what happened at Christmas in that town of Bethlehem is not for wrapping up and putting away in the loft until next December but a gift to keep with us day by day.
Whatever happened to the Shepherds or to the Wise Men after they left that scene in the stable one thing is for sure and that is that their lives would never be the same again. What they witnessed on that Christmas night was both world changing and people changing and it would certainly have changed them. Their lives would never be the same again.
The question for each one of us in this January of the year 2010 is whether Christmas, and the birth of Jesus, which we have just celebrated has changed us? If it has then life will never be the same again for us. It will be far more exciting, far more challenging and far more rewarding. If it has not changed us at all then we should ask ourselves what on earth the last few weeks have been all about!!
God Bless you and those you love in this New Year of 2010.
John Baxter