I suppose it wasn’t my first Christmas. I would have been about five months old then. And almost certainly not my second either. But it’s one of my earliest memories. A dark winter morning. My father woke me and carried me down the stairs into the living room. And there was a tree decorated with colored lights and glittering ornaments. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that was the moment when the category “beautiful” entered my conceptual world. The tree was wonderful in itself. But then he showed me that there were brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Presents! Toys for me! My joy was total, unmarred by philosophy or irony or trauma or experience.
And someday—and fewer years are left between today and that day than now have passed since that first remembered Christmas—my Father will take me, not down the stairs, but up the stairs, through the dark into a place full of lights and color and beauty. And there will be gifts there too, wonderful enough to make me forget all the wrong lessons I’ve learned in the course of sabotaging my own life.
“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) We often say that Christmas is for children, but we forget that we are all to be children, when it comes to receiving the Gift.
Merry Christmas.
Oh, wow. That’s beautiful and touching. God bless you, Lars, for that message.
I know its not Christmas yet and I know I’ve come across an older blog from the “Old Viking Scribbler”
that I should have read when he wrote it… but since Lowe’s and that other orange store I live at are deep into the Christmas season, I figure I must share this now or I promise you I will totally forget it. (Is that a record for a run-on-sentence?)
I just now read Lars’ 12-25-07 blog about the first Christmas he remembers and how he relates that event to all BA Christians going to their just rewards in Heaven. It is a moving blog. It should be re-written each year near Christmas time and perhaps it will be turned into a movie like “A Christmas Carol” and we can all watch it each Christmas time and have fond memories, etc…etc…
(Stop reading here if you wish to savor the above moment… )
In contrast, I recall my 16th. Christmas. The one where my dad was involved for the first and only time. I vividly recall him coming up from the basement of our Iowa farm home holding an M-1 carbine replica and giving it to me. His words of great wisdom: “Now don’t go shooting anything with this!”
(I had actually thought at the time that he had lost it and was going to wipe out the entire family, like you read about sometimes. Headlines would scream: “Iowa farmer wipes out whole family on Christmas morning. He was normally such a quiet fellow…”)
I agree, John. This post of Lars’ is beautiful. Let me be the first to wish you and everyone a very merry Christmas.