It's Christmas Eve and the fourth night of Chanukah.
And I hope by late afternoon, your to-do list is done, and you can take a few moments to reflect.
Chanukah and Christmas are both stories of miracles. The miracle of the band of brothers that turned into an army fighting for religious freedom. The miracle of the oil that lasted eight days. The miracle of the baby born to the poor teenage couple who changed the world.
The angels told Mary and the shepherds "don't be afraid." They remind us to open our hearts to the possibilities of the miracles around us.
Your story is a miracle too. The miracle of being born -- of being alive. The miracle that you love and are loved. The miracle of having TODAY to create as well as you can. The miracles that surround us.
Merry Christmas. Happy Chanukah. May you experience the miracles of the holidays.
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1 comment:
Happy Holidays Rev. Haffner,
Your post would be excellent but for one "less than excellent" detail. . . Joseph and Mary cannot be properly described as a "teenage couple". Mary was probably a teenager, although even that is not a certainty, and it is within possibility that Joseph was a teenager as well, but there simply is not enough information provided in the Bible to determine the age of either Mary or Joseph when they were married. As you are probably aware, Joseph has been traditionally portrayed as a significantly older man in non-Biblical Apocryphal sources. Even as old as 90. . . I could be mistaken but I expect that a free and *responsible* search for the truth will find that no one other than God really knows how old Mary and Joseph were when Jesus was born.
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