by Pastor Bobbie Blackburn

I love Christmas decorations – especially the outside ones! When I was growing up in Miami my Grandpa Blackburn (he was a woodworker) created some pretty neat ones for our house. Daddy put them up every year along with strings of different colored ‘big’ lights under the eves. (They didn’t yet have the beautiful icicle lights).

As I was driving to the Church the week after Thanksgiving, I was examining the houses that already had Christmas decorations up. At one house, I noticed a couple of piles of bright-colored material laying in the yard. It took a few minutes before I made the connection: These were the ‘new’ Christmas decorations – the kind that you have to pump air into for them to take shape and life! During the daytime, they just lay in the grass – lifeless and unimpressive. But come the evening, when the air pump is plugged in – WOW! A huge figure comes to life to grace the neighborhood with a vigilant reminder that Christ’s birth is coming.

There is a connection between us and these new Christmas decorations. When we are not connected to our energy source – we can spend precious time just laying around, lifeless and shapeless, not adding a thing to the Kingdom of God. When we allow Christmas cards and parties and baking and shopping to become “Holiday Preparations” instead of “Soul Preparations” for the birth of our Savior, we can resemble the deflated, uninteresting piles of material in the front yard.

BUT – fill us with the Spirit’s power and presence – sit us at the feet of God in worship and fill us with grace and forgiveness and love and peace – and WOW! We are no longer piles of lifeless material – we are gifted with eternal life and bearers of God, too, into God’s world. May it be so. Amen.