Missing the Main Event
Today is my Aunt and Uncle’s wedding anniversary -- their 51st wedding anniversary. Ask me how I remember the year. I remember because my mother, my aunt’s older sister, was pregnant with me and was not permitted by her doctor to make the trip from Georgia to Huntington for the wedding.
My mom and my aunt were certainly ‘cut from the same cloth’. Caring and giving. Fiercely protective of their children and willing to take self sacrifice to the Nth degree if that’s what was needed to help another. The fact that my mom missed the wedding in no way diluted her love for her sister and did not change the way she felt towards her brother in law. It also did not weaken her love by one little bit that she was not present for the births of her nieces and nephews. We are able to revel in the joy or share in the sorrow of a situation - in absentia – and still have the full power of the event be large in our lives.
Revealed in the beginning of Luke’s birth narrative we find Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth. When Mary greets Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s baby moves. Elizabeth calls Mary’s baby LORD. Elizabeth may or may not have know that she would not be present for the birth of Mary’s baby but that in no way diminished her feeling towards the child.
We do not have to have experienced a hurricane force storm to have compassion for those who have lost much. We do not have to have lost an identical relative or friend to grieve with someone who has. And we do not have to have been present 2000 years ago to love a child that would be savior that would die that would redeem.
This Christmas my prayer is that we (I) put ourselves in another’s ‘shoes’ and laugh with joy, cry with sadness and give until it feels like almost enough > and then give some more.
Steve Matthews
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