Over the phone and through the mail

This Christmas finds our family spread across the country from Colorado to California. How can we continue our tradition of exchanging names when few of us will be together for the holidays?

We just won’t, I decided. It wouldn’t be the same. Besides, it would be wise in this economy to save the expense of giving and mailing. We’ll just pass this year.

No! said our eldest from across two mountain ranges. It’s being part of a family, he said, knowing that you’ve put thought and effort and love into the gifts chosen for your designated member.

“You choose,” he said over the telephone. “You and Dad put all our names in a basket, then choose for each of us and let us know.”

I thought about his words, his insistence that we should pursue the tradition regardless of position. So I wrote our names on slips of paper, eight in all including parents and children and spouses. We tossed them in a cup, picked out one at a time and sent the chosen names to each.

“I got you!,” texted one spouse to our daughter. “What do you want?” The excitement had spread already, unhindered by miles and mountain ranges.

It grew in my own spirit as I considered the one I’d chosen and what specific gift would touch that loved one’s heart. And I realized that distance had not mattered to the first Giver. How far away mankind was from the perfection and love of God! Yet He gave. Across the miles and mountains and galaxies, He sent a specifically selected and perfect gift to His chosen recipients.

Jesus: His love, our life. His living, our hope.

Merry miles-away Christmas to you this year. May you know His perfect Gift.

The Perfect Christmas Gift

If you were God, how would you introduce yourself to your creation?

I’d be 27 years old, a perfect size 8 with flawless complexion, no white hair and an IQ of 145.

I would not show up as a baby, completely helpless and totally dependent upon two people who arrived in town after all the motel rooms were taken and had to sleep in a lean-to. Or a cave.

Good thing I’m not God.

But why a baby?

It’s simple, really. God wanted to become a human, and there is only one way to become a human and that is to be born.

Humans can’t get away from sin. It’s an inherited trait – in the blood, so to speak. God chose to become a human so he could stop the endless cycle by paying man’s long-overdue sin account himself.

So He played by the rules and was born. But he bypassed the blood-born pathogen of sin through birth by a virgin – the virgin who conceived through the seed of God, not sin-filled man. The embryo she carried developed its own blood system, as do all human embryos, and since the mother’s blood does not mix with her baby’s, the baby inherited no sin.

A perfect human.

This god-man lived a sinless life, so when he was killed, his sin-less blood was undeserving of death, and in the eyes of God, that blood paid the penalty of sin and washed away mankind’s debt.

A perfect sacrifice.

Only God could come up with a plan like that.

But He didn’t just pay and run. He conquered death and lived again to walk beside us in our own life-living.

So, you see, Christmas is really all about sacrifice. Maybe that’s why red and green are such prominent seasonal colors: the blood-red ribbons that flow from our evergreen boughs remind of us the Perfect Life that gives the rest of us eternal, ever-life.

If we accept the gift.

And who could refuse a gift like that?