Christmas Euphoria

This is another old blog that is still just as good as it was when it was originally sent out.

Christmas Euphoria

            I have a radio that reads the newspaper to me, a program of volunteers working out of a local station, I note that when the obituaries are read, almost half the deaths have  cremations.  Perhaps this is a sign of the times, the final expense of illness-death... funeral home's draining the last “nickels” from the family.  When I was young, another world, professionalism in the funeral business just like every other type of business, even the poorest received respectable burial care... even a funeral at the church.  Today, every time the body is moved, another charge.  So, even the wealthiest families, just a one expense at the funeral home for visitation-service.  I understand some funeral homes even charge for the public using the bathroom!

            It was Christmas Day, my mother “owned” some poor relatives, a death in one home just before Christmas, I had gone there when the casket arrived at the house.  I was just a child but I helped carry the casket into the house.

            The room in which the casket was placed, did not have a stove for heat, just a fireplace, and it was cold.  Christmas Day, one family member had a small child playing with toys in front of the fireplace.  A member of the community, owner of a large store, had come to the home bringing  food.  He went into the room to pay his respects to the old man in the cheap casket,  father-grandfather-great grandfather.  I will never forget the look of sorrow in his eyes as he looked at me and the child playing in front of the fireplace, as if we are all stuck where we start. 

            With most stories, we always enter at mid-point.  We do not know the sordid lives of the shepherds at that first Christmas, their sordid life, poverty, smell, their hatred of the world and the world’s hatred of them. (Shepherds were the lowest on the ladder, in fact they did not have a ladder, could not go to the temple, give testimony in court) but, even though the public did not believe them, they were the first missionaries, eager to spread the good news and, it is from such people as this that the gospel has been spread around the world.  What if it had been left up to Kings, power-brokers, politicians?

            This man bringing the food to this poor home, probably did not know that the man in the casket had buried four sons in one month during one flu epidemic, that he had held on to his land, borrowing a begging through the great depression, that he had raised his other children making sure they graduated from High School and now, in a cheap casket, resting in a cheap home, but a house that belonged to him, a person who had never received a government welfare check, his funeral would be held on Christmas Day in a cheap wood church which he had helped build.

            It is from such homes as this that America was built, fathers who led his family to the church house, carrying his musket and his Bible.

            Day after Christmas, 2011, a spoiled, decadent society.  If the terrorists took down the electric grids, no electricity for anything, would there be internet withdrawal?  If EMS could get to you, enmeshed in a network of emergency room, hospital connection, would anyone have the ability to care for you?  Do you have a shovel to dig a slit-trench for the disposal of your family's human waste, or dig a grave for a decomposing family member?  Government wants you totally dependent on government, does not want interference. There was a time when government wanted self-sufficient citizens, wanted to know about scams, illegal activity.  The two attached letters from someone who reports scams and illegal activity tells you all you need to know about the future of this country.  God has ingenious ways to humble people, politicians, bureaucrats, scam artists.

            Some of my forefathers, and there is a record of this, before they landed and founded Morristown, NJ (1600) on the ship from England, seasick in the horrid-cold waters of the North Atlantic, were ridiculed by the British sailors, those “hymn-singing, praying, religious fanatics” but, one of the ship's sailors, the wost of the frenzied mockers, got deathly sick himself.  The pilgrims around him prayed, but he died anyway.  After his burial at sea, as had been so many of the pilgrims, there was a total change in the attitude of the ship's crew.  The great message of Christmas is grace.  If you have never sinned you cannot call Christ, Savior.