Today is Christmas Eve. The church office is closed and we’re having Christmas with our family. Children grow up and then there is the conflict over holidays like Christmas. Its overwhelming when you have to lug children in their car seats to more than one house in one day, and the kids hardly get to enjoy their gifts. So, this year, we arranged with our sons to let them have Christmas Day with the other side of the family provided they spent Christmas Eve with us. So today is our Christmas.
Anita and I have determined we will allow our adult children to make whatever arrangements they choose for Christmas and other holidays. We refuse to add to the stress of parenting by demanding they accommodate our schedule. The Bible says, “It is not for the children to lay up for the parents, but the parents to lay up for the children” (2 Corinthians 12:4).
How do you deal with family gatherings for Christmas?
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Tags: Christmas, fellowship, stress
The great sequoia trees of California tower as much as 300 feet above the ground. Strangely, these giants have unusually shallow root systems that reach out in all directions to capture the greatest amount of surface moisture.
Their intertwining roots also provide support for each other against the storms. That’s why they usually grow in clusters. Seldom will you see a redwood standing alone, because high winds would quickly uproot it.
Just as Jesus needed support from his disciples in His hour of trial (Matthew 26:37-38), so do we need such support from one another. Let’s stay connected.
Tags: fellowship, support, tree
Over the Christmas season my brothers and sisters and their families got together. My brother brought over a box of memorabilia he had gathered from Mom & Dad’s old house. Included in the box was a stack of old letters my grandmother (who died in 1956) wrote to my Dad when he was away in the US Navy during World War 2. This stack of hand-written letters was a treasure-trove of family history information. She tried to keep him up to speed on everything back home from his “kittie”, to his cousin, Ralph Diehl, serving in India, to the 1944 death of her brother-in-law, Charley Aldrich.
Among her lamentations in those letters, written from 1943-1945, was her request to receive a letter from him. “Why don’t you write?” she asked often. In one 1944 letter, she noted that it had been three months since she had heard from her son, in spite of the fact that she sent a letter to him every Monday that he was gone.
Perhaps that question remains for us today. In spite of God’s efforts to reach out to you and I daily, how often do we respond to Him? Perhaps you, like my father, have gotten wrapped up in important business, and just forgot. But He sends us regular reminders. Maybe God is speaking to your heart right now: “Why don’t you…”.
Of Samuel’s parents, it is recorded, “And they rose up in the morning early, and worshipped before the Lord, and returned, and came to their house to Ramah” (1 Samuel 1:19).
Tags: fellowship, relationship, World War II
In a Bill Moyers interview, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., made reference to the work of Marshall Klaus, one of her former colleagues at Stanford Medical School. Klaus, who was chief of the intensive care nursery, conducted an experiment in which half the babies in the nursery would be treated as usual, that is to say with high-tech incubators and millions of dollars of equipment, and the other half would be touched for fifteen minutes every few hours. Nurses would simply take their “pinky” finger and gently rub it down the backs of these tiny infants.
This was out of the ordinary as these intensive care babies were not often touched for fear of getting germs on them. The results were astounding. They discovered that the babies who were touched survived better. Dr. Remen said, “No one knows why. Maybe there’s something about touching that strengthens the will to live. Maybe isolation weakens us.”
What do you think is the secret of these babies’ increased survival?
Tags: babies, care, fellowship, touch
Former Evangelist Dwight L. Moody told the story of a Methodist minister, on his way to a camp meeting, through some mistake took passage on the wrong riverboat. He found that instead of being bound for a religious gathering, he was on his way to a horse race. His fellow passengers were betting and discussing the events, and the whole atmosphere was foreign to his nature. He asked the captain to stop his boat and let him off at the first landing, as the atmosphere was so distasteful to him.
The story continues to relate how, on the same occasion, a sporting man, intending to go to the races, by some mistake found himself on the wrong boat, bound for the camp meeting. The conversation about him was no more intelligible to him than to the man in the first boat, and he, too, asked the captain to stop and let him off the boat.
Mr. Moody concluded: “Now what was true in these two cases is practically true with everyone. A true Christian is wretched where there is no fellowship, and an unregenerate man is not at ease where there are only Christians. A man’s future will be according to what he is here prepared for. If he is not regenerate, heaven will have no attractions for him. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.”
Ever found yourself in a place where you were very uncomfortable? Tell us about it.
Tags: fellowship, mistake