Dear Caldwell,
As I whisked into the hospital to visit a member today, I passed a young mother holding her newborn, no doubt only hours old. Mother and child had just been discharged.
The baby was swaddled in a soft, clean, new hospital blanket. That’s a good thing as they were headed out into today’s damp, cold weather.
What must mom have been thinking and feeling, I thought to myself?
What kind of home were they headed to, what kind of world would that child know? Did mom feel wonder and awe as she held her bundle of new life? On this eve of Christmas Eve, did she step out into the world as that child’s mother with fear or excitement?
What, as scripture said about Mary, did she “ponder in her heart?”
I pray, at least, that she felt hope – the hope that poet Ann Weems wrote of in her work, The Christmas Spirit:
The Christmas spirit
is that hope
which tenaciously clings
to the hearts of the faithful
and announces
in the face
of any Herod the world can produce
and all the inn doors slammed in our faces
and all the dark nights of our souls
that with God
all things are still possible,
that even now
unto us
a Child is born.
For a strong dose of that same hope, we’ll plan on seeing you tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. for our Lessons and Carols Service, a service full of sights and sounds, music and scripture. Grab a friend. Come early. We leave declaring light in the darkness – and hope for all.
In Christ,
John