Sunday Morning Serenity

I'm thinking this morning about the ties that bind, the ones that can't be broken by time, distance, or circumstance. Dave and I have struggled this season to find any time to stop working and just be still and enjoy Christmas. This weekend, we finally strung a few lights and put up the Nativity that my mother gave me years ago. The picture propped in the window above it was taken before I was born. It's our church family at the groundbreaking for the "new church," which was built around 1960. The dark section on the left side is the choir. (My mother still has a beautiful alto voice, even though she says she can't sing "worth a flip" any more.) Some of the people in that picture are related by blood—my mother and quite a few aunts and uncles are standing there together. Others are friends and neighbors who have remained so for several generations.

I didn't put the Nativity and the church together intentionally. It just worked out that way. But I like looking at them together. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. Here's a group of people in a little town in Alabama, bound together in love and fellowship by a shared faith, a shared hope, born to a young Jewish couple more than 2000 years ago. Husbands and wives go through so much together, and each step of the journey binds them together more. Can you even begin to imagine taking the kind of step—the giant leap—that Mary and Joseph took together? They were forever bound, not just by their love for each other but by their extraordinary circumstances. 

Good and bad, the experiences that we share bind us together. So does love. So do memories. There are people I profoundly miss this Christmas season. But then part of me feels like they're still with me, just in a different way. They gave me so much of themselves while they were here that I carry them with me always, like the melody of a beautiful old hymn, like the comfort of knowing there's a place called home, like the story of a baby in a manger and the hope He gave us long ago.

Comments

[Candy Hicks]

LOVELY :)