Insight for your “Journey across the Sky”
A View from the Nest www.eagleviews.org
Random Ramblings from the Resident Raptor
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The celebrations have ended, the decorations have all come down, the gifts have all been exchanged, and the memories have all been made. Now it is time to box up Christmas for another year as business returns to normal. Check-out lanes at the local merchants are getting thinner, the return lanes are closing down, and Christmas music has been replaced with pre-Christmas Muzak programming.
The debate over Christmas displays have ended, and all things return to normal. Yet the fact that a child had been born of a virgin in Bethlehem should never be lost even though the nativity sets have been packaged away for yet another year.
What really is the meaning of Christmas? Why is there such a celebration? Would it matter a whit if Christmas was boxed away forever?
It would seem arguments against Christmas, which usually sprang from the secular left, have sprung up from the religious right as well. Prominent pastors warned of Santa replacing Jesus as the focus of the holiday and a fringe Baptist church in Kansas wanted a sign placed in the Washington State Capital warning “Santa Claus will take you to Hell.” How far we have come from the days of “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” to today where even prominent church leaders are calling for the demise of Christmas.
In, what many call the best loved Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, George Bailey, played by James Stewart, becomes disillusioned with despair, from a downturn in his business and wishes he were dead. Guardian Angel Clarence, played by Henry Travers, intervenes and shows George what his little town would have been like had he never been born.
Can you imagine a world in which light never shines, darkness is never vanquished and Jesus was never born? Can you picture a place where evil reigns unchecked and mankind is left to his own devises in dealing with a depraved soul? Can you imagine a world where God never intervened in human affairs but rather just sat back and let us kill and destroy each other?
Thoughts and views as seen from the resident raptor. Reflecting on life and the world as I see it.
