Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
I remember as a child the festive excitement from Thanksgiving on through Christmas. Then I remember the letdown feeling that came with December 26--how dreary the future seemed--364 boring days until another Christmas can come again!
It wasn't only that there would be no more presents: we didn't have much in those days anyway. It was the joylessness of no more Christmas songs about the birth of Jesus until late next year, no more telling of the Bethlehem story; we must put the shepherds and the Wise Men away from our focus of attention; the "Star in the East" won't shine again for a year. It was going to be a bleak eleven months. For this child, life revolved around Christmas.
No one in my little circle seemed to know how to tell really what were the "good tidings of great joy" that the angels told the shepherds the night when Jesus was born. The theological definitions were of course in words beyond my childhood grasp--atonement, justification, righteousness by faith, reconciliation; they all were over my head.
But what I would have loved to hear would have been the story told in simple words, how Jesus by His life and death had already given me eternal happiness that would brighten all my 365 days in the year to come. Each day would be a better-than-Christmas "in Christ." I needed to understand the character of the Father and of His Son (there were shadows in the non-Christmas preaching I had heard about the wrath of God and an ever-burning hell). Once my thankfulness for my few Christmas presents wore off, I frankly didn't know what to be thankful for any more. The somber non-Christmas life I was facing from December 26 on was not very bright.
I suspect that there are still other children as bewildered as I was. Even though we can "put away childish things" (1 Cor. 13:11), I pray that the Lord Jesus may teach us through His Holy Spirit how to tell the pure Good News to children in an intelligible way that will brighten their lives now and forever.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: December 24, 2004.
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