This is the season when families, friends and businesses exchange Holiday Greetings. Whether we are wishing a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanza Greetings or just Best Wishes in the New Year, we have a long tradition of greeting cards . . . and the newer desktop publishing-enhanced practice of including the annual letter updating everyone on some version of what what happened in the past year. Some of these annual letters are actually believable.
Increasingly, Hallmark and American Greetings are being cut out of the deal and I am getting electronic versions of the greeting card or an email containing the annual letter. Quite a few of these carry reminders of the meaning of these holy days in the form of a comment or a selection of text from the Bible. Here’s one from our good friends John and Ruth Ridgway . . .
CHRISTMAS is when we reflect on Jesus’ entry into the human race and into human history.
God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In His Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all.
— Romans 8:3, The Message
THE NEW YEAR is an opportunity for us to live differently and to let God shape our lives to be like Him.
God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as the life of His Son.
— Romans 8:28, The Message
I love that. It’s the kind of intervention I need at the closing of this year. How about you? What kind of intervention do you need?
