"Whoville..............."

One might think a fellow over forty years a believer in Christ would really be into celebrating His birth; but, in truth, there’s not much about all the hoopla we’ve attached to it that speaks to me. When you boil it all down, gifts, decorated trees, mall crowds and traffic jams, Santa Claus fun to share with the little diddles, if the Babe in the manger hasn’t been born as well in a man’s “belly”, all one really has is man still searching to answer the emptiness inside himself. Tuesday evening the Elementary level at our church school brought forth a Christmas cantata. All of the kids were in holiday colors, red, white, and black, with a splash of grey here and there. One chubby little dark-haired girl in the front row to the far right, no doubt in the First Grade or Kindergarten, however, was wearing a blue satiny dress; but what really one’s drew attention to her was the way she held both sides of the skirt as she swung her hips to the rhythm of the music. On the other end of that same row to the left, her counterpart, another child, thin with long brown hair and in a red velvet outfit, continually danced around as well, her focus more on her mother than the program. Eventually she would be repositioned. If my heart was captured from the very start by such simplicity, though, the message within the lyrics of the carols they shared touched something deeper within me. For a little over thirty minutes the Grinch was gone. The Spirit had me rejoicing in “the reason for the season”……