Christmas is Coming

I barely know most of these ladies. While they meet for Sunday school, so do I – but I’m with a group of 5^th graders and they are with each other.  It makes it more difficult to know them.  Not impossible, though.  Because every year they have a Christmas party and they invite me.  I’m not much for turning down parties, so I go.  This year’s party was last night.  In the spirit of full disclosure, you might as well know that I have to relearn some names every year, but I’m getting better! 

These ladies who make up Peggy Kendrick’s Sunday School Class – what can I say?  They are a special group.  Every year, our sweet hostess says her house is too small for the group.  Every year we say that we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  Every year, we have a feast because there are some good fantastic cooks in this bunch.  Where else are you going to get amazing rolls that take two days to make?!  Every year, we have a devotional and last night was a really special one – borrowed from Paul Harvey, no less.  (It’s included at the end of this post if you would like to know why Jesus came to earth as a human baby.)  Every year we pray – we give thanks and we ask for blessings for others.  And every year, we have a gift exchange that confuses most of us and keeps us all laughing.

This group of ladies has included me even though I meet with them once a year.  They are fun and friendly and loving and, best of all, they love the Lord.  They like to laugh.  I like to laugh.  Perfect match right there.  Our Christmas parties usually end when someone has to leave for whatever reason.  I’m willing to venture that not many parties ever broke up because someone announced, “I’m out of oxygen.  I’ve got to go.”  Ours did. 

I don’t know much about how Sunday school classes are formed.  I don’t know the protocol for assigning someone to a class.  Here’s what I do know:  The ladies of Peggy Kendrick’s Sunday School Class will take you in and love you to pieces.  If you are looking for a Sunday School class, this one comes highly recommended. 

 Courtesy of Paul Harvey – just in case you are wondering why Jesus came in human form:

The man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man.

“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound…Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud…At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.

Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them…He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms…Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me…That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.

“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safe, warm…to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas.

And he sank to his knees in the snow.