All About GOD - Growing Relationships with Jesus and Others

What have you done with Jesus?

What have you done with Jesus? Christmas, 2016.

Good Day!

The morning after Thanksgiving, we went to cut down our tree for Christmas, and by four o'clock, I was stringing it with lights, with Jim Brickman singing in the background. Our 'Thanks-mas' dinner would be on Sunday evening, and I was getting ready. You see, all four of my children were going to be sitting around the same table for the first time in more than a year-and this year, there would be three grandchildren!

All of it required preparation. Preparation is a big part of the holiday season.

Turns out, it always has been. Before Jesus was born, a different sort of preparation took place. Mary and Joseph had to travel about 90 miles from Nazareth south to little Bethlehem, where they had to register for the census, decreed by Rome. Now I've seen the landscape; it is rugged country-even today, though of course the roads are paved and the way of travel much more comfortable. I traveled up and around and down into Nazareth in a taxi cab, and then back down near Bethlehem, and I cannot imagine navigating the Judean desert on the back of a donkey, great with child.

Indeed the preparation by Joseph and Mary for Jesus' birth was entirely different. They were fulfilling a civic duty that apparently determined the place of our King's birth, but Bethlehem was not an accident birthplace at all. God always has his plans. Some 700 years before Mary made that trek, Micah had prophesied that the Messiah would be born right there in Bethlehem. Micah 5.2.

Back to my preparations . . . I got out the little nativity set and asked my 11-year-old grandson, Jacob, to set it up, complete with a little snow to add around it. First dilemma: what to do with Jesus. Do we put him in the manger now, or wait until Christmas morning?