Dec 13th: Just Pondering...



I took a walk in a shopping mall recently. It seems to me that Santa Villages or Santa Castles in shopping malls are getting smaller and less elaborate this Christmas. Maybe Santa begins to feel the impact of the pandemic after all. Maybe Santa and his helpers have to go through some severe cutbacks. I also wondered where the children were? There was no line-up. It has not been easy for young children to be kids due to the Covid-19 protocols.


Perhaps when we fail to acknowledge the real reason behind Christmas, we also throw away any fantasies we create to take their place. Our human minds can become so bored when we are only preoccupied with the here and now. Our inability to acknowledge God has a plan for us eternally has taken us to the place where taking the next step in life can be the continuum of meaninglessness.


My walk in this mall was interrupted when a young person almost bumped into me while texting. Maybe Santa has a better following in Social Media than in either his castles or villages. They will issue their own passports to grant entrance privileges to their little guests with all of the needed QR codes. We cannot call his helpers dwarfs either. That word might be unacceptable to social media police. We live in a world that has not much certainty. We have no idea how to talk to one another. We have problems expressing ourselves without knowing what trouble we might get ourselves into while unknowingly offending some people.


So where are we this Christmas? Let us go back to the basics. Forget all of the talks about the new variant and how it may impact us. It appears to us that we have no solution for this mess. God will be God, and nothing is new to Him as much as we seem to think that we need to take care of everything. Science will never be the answer for all of our human struggles. We have no solution for human predicaments caused by sin. Christmas is the only answer for that. Trying is to replace it with our own human fantasy is like denying a hopeful choice while dealing with hopelessness.


“For nothing will be impossible with God.” – Luke 1:37


“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and come down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” – James 1:17

 

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" - John 1:29

 

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