Writer's Notebook

It wasn't that David hated Christmas, it was just that he found it such an immense challenge trying to find something new and relevant to say every time. He felt like this every year when Christmas came around. He knew hundreds of people would be setting foot into his church for the Christmas service, people for the most part knew and cared very little about Jesus. But he knew that the child born so long ago in Bethlehem loved each and every one of them with a love so sincere and so immense that it pained him every time he thought of all those so indifferent to his love.

That was why ever year in the week preceding Christmas he would take off to be on his own. It was becoming a tradition with and one which his wife wholeheartedly applauded. She too felt keenly the burden placed on her husband during this time, and welcomed the opportunity for him to spend some time in quiet contemplation in order to prepare his Christmas services.

This year, the weather had been mild and so David took off into the hills and spent three days in a small travellers' hut with just his Bible and his writing materials as companions, and a pile of firewood as his only luxury. Whether Jesus had this same luxury in the stable? And whether it really was in the bleak midwinter when he was born? David made a mental note to do some research on the climatic conditions in Israel at the time.

How much has changed since those days, he thought as he read several times through the different gospel versions of Jesus' birth. And yet??? There was poverty and misery all around that stable, just as there was today. Sickness and death were perhaps more common then, but they still regularly reared their ugly head today. How many funerals, how many conversations with suffering relatives or people touched by illness proved the truth of that fact. The very fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem was due to the ravages of political dictatorship and upheaval, things he had seen with his own eyes and experienced on his own body during several trips he had made that year. And then there was the misery that can't be seen. Then as now, people living in grand, luxurious houses yet bowed down by the sorrow of rejection, the pain of guilt or deprivation caused by depression.

How much has changed in our world since then, thought David; yet how little has our world changed. And now, he knew what he had to say at Christmas. Then as now Jesus comes into a needy world to bring help, hope and salvation to all who desire it.