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When my son was in college I think his favorite Christmas song was "I'll be Home for Christmas." That might be every college student's favorite song. He started counting the days, the hours, and the minutes until it was time to go home. But none of our kids have ever experienced anything like what my wife calls her loneliest Christmas.
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The short story writer, Bret Hart, gives us a story out of the Old West about a town called Roaring Camp. I think it's a story that brings the miracle of Christmas into very sharp focus into our lives today and I want to share it with you.
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The Christmas season always involves these big shopping decisions, "What should we get for the kids?" Well, our children over the years were always helpful enough to provide us with a list. Now it's kids and grandkids. And now it's our grandchildren that really have great lists.
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In some ways I'm glad the three little Hutchcrafts aren't little any more. When they were, the day before Christmas always meant assembling some "easy to assemble" toy. I hate those words! It wasn't easy to assemble. Oh, and the day after, oh that's nice. It usually meant fixing what was not easy to assemble in the first place. It seems like the day after Christmas there was always something was broken. Actually, there's some fixing that needs to happen before Christmas.
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The sign said Antique Auto Show, so my wife and I decided that we'd take fifteen minutes and stop at this car dealership and look at the antique autos. Really we were interested in seeing the ones that, you know, like went back to the 50s and 60s. There was this one, sleek, black '66 Mustang that had a flawless exterior, a rich interior, the hood was open so you could look at the horsepower underneath.
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Ellis Island was the first piece of America that millions of immigrants ever saw – ever touched. Perhaps it was that way for somebody in your family. Ellis Island was the point of entry for all the immigrants coming through New York; a little island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
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A boy from the south side of Chicago; a girl from the Ozarks and they lived happily ever after. It's the story of my wife and me. As we approached our wedding day several years ago, (ahem!) it was a week after our college graduation. We had a lot of love, but no money to speak of.
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We were trying to teach some young leaders the importance of teamwork. One of the exercises I used was to have them put together a puzzle. (I thought it was a bright idea.) You tear off a page of a magazine, tear it into pieces, dump it into the middle of each small group, and see who could put their pictures together first. It didn't work too well. See, I forgot one little thing. I forgot to give them a copy of the complete picture so they could see what it should look like when it was all together. Duh! Now, I've tried to work on one of those big, many-pieces puzzles myself, and I've had the same frustration because I didn't know where the top of the puzzle box top was. It was really hard to put the pieces together when the complete picture wasn't there.
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My wife hates snakes! Okay, let's just get that out there. Her skin crawls almost at the mention of those critters. Of course, growing up in the Ozarks didn't exactly help her learn to appreciate them. And then there were the weeks she spent as a counselor at a camp deep in the woods. Oh, man, that really didn't help.
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Christians that were in Russia anytime during the 1950s to about 1990 were familiar with the voice of Nick Leonovich. For decades before the Iron Curtain came down, Nick had been faithfully broadcasting the gospel in Russian to his people. When the doors began to open, and Nick would travel through Russia and meet those Russian believers finally, a lot of them would stop him and they'd say, "Hey, I know your voice! You led me to Christ." Wow!
