Wednesday, December 18, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Family
The angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
We have been going to the Advent chapels on Monday and Wednesdays at Austin Classical School. We sit in the back with Andi, and the kids walk by us to their seats. When Miles goes by he pokes whichever of us is sitting on the aisle. Then, giggling, he looks back to see how we respond after he’s safely past. We giggle too.
Jasper sits on the other side of the sanctuary, and when he leaves he looks over at us from far away. We wave and he waves. We all smile. Such a simple thing, these mutual expressions of affection.
On Friday we saw movies at the Bullock Museum Imax Theater in Austin, one about a French family shipwrecked on the way to Texas in the 1700’s. After a confrontation with the Spaniards, and then another with the Karakowa Indians the three children were separated from their parents, and then from each other. A rough but compassionate French commander listened to the oldest boy’s story and all of us together imagined the awful things he’d gone through.
After his story the commander brought in his two siblings, and what was left of their family rejoiced together. Divers excavated the three hundred year old ship from Galveston Bay in the 1970s, and the Bullock Museum’s lavish display of its skeleton was much more impressive when we left the theater than it had ever been before.
A green frog jumped straight at us on the giant screen in the middle of Animal Kingdom: A Tale of Six Families, our second movie. Dung-eating beetles, penguins and bald eagles, frogs, crocodiles, tiny fish and giant fish and finally lions and tigers, bears and elephants shared their lives with us for an hour or so.
Today we’ll be singing along at the last chapel before Christmas. Andi might sit closer to the stage, in case she wins another prize for the most outrageous Christmas sweater. And at the end of the day, Christmas vacation will begin.
Eight and five year olds can’t get enough of Christmas. Their hopes and dreams don’t stop coming. Their imaginations haven’t been jaded by too much TV, not yet. We love being around them, just so we can catch their wave of joy and hope. They might not have the words, but they have the real thing, which is always better than mere descriptions.
What will we be doing this Friday? We’re not sure yet, but if we’re with those boys it will fill us with joy and hope.
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. He had no relations with her until she b ore a son, and he named him Jesus.
(Jeremiah 23, Psalm 72, Matthew 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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