Emmanuel

December has been a blur and now we find ourselves four days away from the dawn of a new year.  As a church we have been busy with Journey Through Bethlehem, our Christmas dinner, the true story of Christmas told through the performances of I Hear The Prophet Callin’, and the story told through the eyes of little children as the Children’s Ministry threw a birthday party for Jesus, and then a truly white Christmas Eve as we celebrated God’s greatest gift in our Christmas Eve services.  As a family, our December was especially blessed by the marriage of Emily and Adam.

I’m sure it has been a busy and perhaps hectic month for you as well.  But I hope that you have been able to set aside time to really consider God’s gift of life through Jesus Christ.   Think about it this way…in 1990 at the request of Carl Sagan, eminent astronomer, Voyager 1, as it was leaving the Solar System, turned its camera around to take a photo of Earth from a record distance.  The Pale Blue Dot photo has become famous for its incredible depiction of just how small a speck we are on the grand scale of the universe.  Moved by the photo, Sagan observed that “our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”  And he would go on to conclude that “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

But the wise men from the time of Jesus’ birth looked up at the vastness of the universe and came to a different conclusion.  Isaiah 9:2 ~ On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a great Light has dawned. And if we are wise today, we will acknowledge that we are but a speck, but we know the God who breathed the stars and the galaxies into existence. The same God who descended to this pale speck in the form of Jesus, Emmanuel…God WITH us. And every day of the year we can live in the glory of this perfect plan, this precious gift that brings us life and saves us from ourselves.

That is my prayer as we close out this year…that we would truly recognize that God is with us. That the Creator of the universe desires to interact with us intimately as we daily determine that Jesus will be Lord.