Holiday

I enjoyed black Friday...the day after thanksgiving where the best sales are on and the city beats itself to the register to gain those great deals. The experience was quite exciting and I don't regret going.

I don't mind exuberance for Holiday.

Christians need not disrupt the process of capitalism and accumulation. For although some flailing shoppers mirror desperation and seemingly incoherent fatalism trying to find rest, some depict the excitement that monetary blessings, Thanksgiving, brisk clear air, holiday, and gladness, generate. I believe blessings can be enjoyed, even at 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning.

I know why I celebrate. I'm not perfect and I celebrate the fact that I'm not, but that I've still been allowed to celebrate, to give thanks to enjoy birth.

Soon we'll read over and over again the Shepherd and Angels story. Then I'll lead everyone back to Revelation 12 again, comforted that a throng, an army of Angels visited that night to protect their King from the Dragon...to whisk him away and tend to Him, knowing that the beautiful Angel and his demons would not break their lines. The Shepherds had no idea that a great battle was being waged that night...they simply trembled.

But I know, and so do I.

My young one was whisked away, not that Salvation might be imparted to all, but because God willed it...she would've been about a year old and I imagined that she would enjoy the sunrise with me. I held my little nephew in the half-light of the morning and light warmed my hands filled with nappies, blankey, and he suckled on a binkey...he breathed softly in my arms and watched the sun speak. My soul enjoyed minutes. But my heart, a thing the Sun has not yet warmed, mourned a bit...

Because I know the Angels have told me not to fear, yet I do sometimes. They give and they take by God's name and I am afraid.

And so I prefer to know that Revelation tell me that a quiet scene in the hills of the Middle East, yet at the center of the world, was not a quiet scene, but one where God's voice cried out in fame and fury and power and love. He didn't send a bunch of happy angels pacing anxiously in the waiting room. He sent them full of armor and muscle...and I know that God wills...and I am fortunate to have seen it.

That is why I celebrate.