Another Gift?

All this talk about the doldrums of January never come and park themselves at my home. In fact, I feel like Christmas just keeps coming. We have just passed the Orthodox Christmas the other day, but that’s not what I’m referring to here.  Last summer I wrote about how I continued to find Christmas decorations or ‘stuff’ around the house and I believed that I had finally found the last vestiges of Christmas past, only to find another a week later. Well, I’m not talking about that either.
This week places us at approximately four weeks past Christmas. Well wouldn’t you know, Christmas arrived once more. No, it’s not the present for someone else that still rests here in the livingroom waiting delivery. It was a gift to me that was over a year in coming. After the Christmas Eve service of 2011 a women came up to me and offered the gift of a child’s toy from the distant past. I had brought one such toy to the service from my childhood and this person said they also had some and wondered if I would be interested in having them. Well, like many things in life, it was forgotten until this Christmas when I received an surprise email asking if I still wanted them. After a few stops and starts I was able to pick them up this past weekend.  What a gift. A whole box of Minibrix.  You will have to look that one up. As I said to them, “these items bring the child out in me all over again.
The exact same thing happens to each and everyone of us when we open the bible and read a passage we read a long time before. Something in that passage renews our hearts where the words of God connected in the past and unites it with the reality of how it moves and creates in us a joy of just knowing Jesus in a renewed way today.
One thing I know about people coming to the Lord for the first time is they are excited about finding Him and finding a faith that transforms. They are excited. They want more and more and they want it yesterday. It’s something akin to a child seeing something for the first time. Wide eyed and excited. Sort of wishing for something for Christmas many many years ago and waiting in anticipation to open the gift and finding not only what we want but what we need.
That is how it can be each and every day of our lives as we pray to a loving God for those things in our lives that make it rich and rich in Him. And it happens each time we open our bible.
Something to think about
Rob