For those not doing the Advent Journal with us, I wanted to give you a taste of what we are reading. Les wrote today’s devotion and here is one of the illustrations he used.
I heard about a mom and kids who begged their husband
and dad to join them for the Christmas Eve service, but
he wasn’t a churchgoer for 51 other weeks in the year,
and he didn’t see the need to make the week of December
25th an exception. No, he would stay home on the snowy
Christmas Eve in New England and keep the fire going.
The man was watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the
gazillionth time, when he heard a thump on the window.
A few seconds later, there was another thump. He
walked to the window to discover that birds were flying
into the window in an effort to escape the cold and the
wind outside.
The man’s heart went out to the desperate creatures, so
he ran to the barn, opened the door, and turned the light
on, hoping they would fly to shelter, but they didn’t
respond.
The man ran over to the birds and began to yell and
wave his arms, hoping to guide them toward the barn
and into safety, but his actions only seemed to cause them
to panic.
The frustrated would-be savior thought to himself, “If
only I could get through to them! If only I spoke their
language. If I could be a bird, just for a few seconds, I
could save them. . .”
At that thought, the man stopped dead in his tracks. Why
hadn’t he seen it before? He quickly checked his watch.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. He ran inside the house,
grabbed the keys to his truck, and drove off into the night
toward the church, where an unsuspecting family was
getting ready to receive their best Christmas present ever.
There’s an old Christmas song that reads,
“Little Baby in a manger, I love you. Coming down to earth a
stranger, I love you. Wise men saw the star and answered, ‘I
love you.’ Little baby in a manger, I love you.”
And that baby grew up to be a man—a perfect
man—the Son of God. He loved us enough to put
skin on, come to this earth, live a selfless life, die a
sacrificial death for our sins, be raised from the
dead, eventually to go back to His Father and
prepare a place for all who will trust and follow
Him. – LH