This BLOG is sponsored by “Misty Hollow Carving”. You are welcome to visit Misty Hollow and see all of my carvings.
My Web Site is a like a Gallery – please drop in for a stroll through.
To help me promote my Web Site please copy this URL address and email to someone today http://www.murraylincoln.com/
* * * * * * * * *
Today’s Blog Post
The Christmas Story 2009
It has been our family tradition for many years to settle beside our Christmas Tree, just before opening gifts, and pause to remember why we celebrate Christmas. We do this by reading the Christmas Story form the Bible.Usually we open to the account given in the Account Presented by Luke – the Gospel Writer.
We sit and listen to the reader tell the story in Luke’s words of that long ago happening for a small family of Joseph and Mary, then adding Jesus to their lives. It tells of the taxation and the call for all the Bethlehem people to return to their village of origin and be recorded in the census being taken.
It is murder for the kids to sit that long and listen when the gifts under the tree are keeping their complete attention. Talk about torture.
This year was not different – last night as we celebrated our first Christmas of 2009. Five days from now we will do it again with another part of our family.
This year was different in that I asked everyone in the living room around our tree to tell the story with me. Each person told a little bit of the story and then stopped for the next person to share their part. Not rehearsed and not planned nor practiced. It was perfect.
When someone jumped in with their part and made a mistake Emma, our 10 year old granddaughter, spoke up saying, “No it was this way…. I know because I studied this part in Sunday School just last Sunday!”
Instead of a drawn out and long reading of a story that almost all have memorized we shared together and LOVED IT! We all participated.
I shared with our family the facts that Father Ted Hughes shared at a Chaplaincy Banquet a few weeks ago. Father Ted is a Catholic Priest that is a great speaker and someone that engages you totally. Dynamic.
Father Ted told of his visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in recent years. He shared how over the years that most of the Christian artifacts and sites had been razed by the Non Christian invaders.
When one of the invading groups entered the Nativity Scene they saw the large paintings on the wall of the Wise Men coming on their camels to the nativity scene. The invaders decided not to destroy this site because the Wise Men were dressed in the clothes of the Persians – where they had come from to bring gifts to Baby Jesus – the ‘Born New King’. The invaders recognized the clothing and reasoned that the site must be a shrine or holy site from their part of the world – so they didn’t destroy it.
This small testimony by Father Ted a few weeks ago – grabbed our attention last evening as we considered the fact that the small Holy Site that still draws people today – over 2000 years later – did the same for our family again.
If you haven’t had your grandkids tell you what you know… you should try it some time.
Last evening a special treat happened again. Great Grandma Lincoln, Marion Nellie Kirkpatrick Lincoln sat with her son and his wife, her granddaughter and her husband and her two great grandkids to open presents one more time.
For Marion Nellie Kirkpatrick it started 88 Christmases ago. Then when she was in her early 20s she married and the Christmas came to her home. I have celebrated with her many years – and this was my 65 th Christmas. It was great to be with her again – and to have her with us now.
Last night I enjoyed the Christmas story like never before!
~ Murray Lincoln ~
www.murraylincoln.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment