Merry Christmas

I sincerely hope everyone had (or is still having) an enjoyable Christmas. I definitely did. I even ushered at my church this morning at the Christmas service. Apparently this is the first year my church has ever held a Christmas day service (in addition to their 2 Christmas Eve services of course). To me, it makes sense to have a service on Christmas in celebration of Christ's birth, but it was a novel idea for many people that attended this morning. Here is the clip from the bulletin:

"Though it's hard to remember after so many times watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and going to the mall, Christmas is the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth, a poor Palestinian peasant and carpenter who taught people to love and forgive. If that's all you know about Jesus, Christmas will have only about as much meaning as the birthday of Abraham Lincoln or of Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you come to accept what the Bible teaches-that Jesus is not only a remarkable human being but also the Son of God who came to earth-then Christmas changes everything. It then answers some of the most profound cries of the human heart:

"Does God understand what I deal with?" Yes. God shared our human nature, and so, in the words of the author Chuck Swindoll, "He breathed our air, felt our pain, knew our sorrows, and died for our sins. He didn't come to frighten us, but to show us the way to warmth and safety."

"Does God care about me?" Yes. As Joe Stowell put it, "The stunning point of Christmas is that God considered my needs adn the worth of my relationship to Him to be sufficient cause to go through the truama of changing places."

Suddenly, life has meaning, because God lived it. Our body has value becuase God took on a human body. Our death is no longer the final word, because God has overcome it. This baby lying in an animal's feeding trough is everything we've hoped for and everything we need."

I've been enjoying time with my cousin and his eldest daughter from Singapore, my Uncle from Ohio and the rest of my family. I even played some card games a few nights ago that I'd never played before...I must have "missed" these types of games during my college years ; )

If anyone would like to go to Holiday Magic at Brookfield Zoo this weekend or ice skating with me, that'd be fun cause I really want to go.