Christmas has always been about hope, about belief in the face of despair. In the dark times of both His first and second comings, Jesus Christ brought hope. By teaching and example, He gave us directions to a better way of living and how to rise above our tragedies. He explains Who He is and why we are so that we can better relate to Him. He offers to help us make life on earth as it is in heaven, to give us power over our evils that we could never achieve on our own. Just as a small baby in a back corner of the Roman empire didn’t seem like much, but turned out to be Jesus Christ, the God of the universe, so the small things that happen in our lives may bring great and unexpected good from Him. How could it be otherwise when He is laying out our destiny from His infinite knowledge and we have only our cramped and often confused or plain wrong understanding of our life events? “Thy will be done” is a mighty practical approach for us to take in the face of such an enormous disparity of understanding!
So Christmas is a gift, a reminder to us in the midst of the hurly-burly immediacies of our distracted lives to stop and reflect, like the shepherds and Wise Men before us, on the Infinite and the Eternal. We are, after all, in eternity right now. And what we are and do from this beginning will define who we will be down the river of spiritual time beyond our imagination.