for my child, and your child, too

Every year, our world goes silent, for just one day. Twenty-four/seven businesses close (a personal hurray), highways are empty, families reunite. We string lights on trees and prepare lavish meals and light candles and sing old familiar songs. There are different traditions, considering the region, of course, but overall, this one day is observed as a day of of goodwill toward fellow man, of good works, and peace on Earth. In our grandparents' day, even warring armies laid down their weapons and played Christmas music over the frozen battlefields.

And believers scoff at this. We listen to the songs, that proclaim war is over, that yearn for peace at least in our children's lifetimes, and we shake our heads sadly. "That's ridiculous," we say, our faces good proper religious masks of mourning. "Poverty will never be abolished. Prisons will always be full. Disease will never be eradicated. Oppression will never cease. Peace will never come to Earth."

And so often we stop our thought there.

 That is not the Bible I read.

The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,

because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent Me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners,

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor.

Forgive me, but that sounds a damn lot like war is over, we'll see the day of glory.

No matter what you believe about the millennium (or if you even believe in a literal thousand-year reign of Christ over the Earth), if you call yourself by His name--Christian--then you are quite obliged to believe in peace on earth. It's what the angels proclaimed at His birth; it's what He Himself promised He would bring. If you claim to believe that Jesus is Who He said He is . . . then you claim to believe in literal peace on earth.

The main difference, I think, between the world's hopes and our belief, is that believers know that peace will only come with the return of the Son of God, Who will wipe all tears from our eyes, the One Who tells us, Behold, I am making all things new. We know that we need this renewing, this changing from within. We know that we ourselves are helpless to usher in peace on earth, for we have war in our hearts.

So we cry out, Come, Lord Jesus, and we watch the sky, and we do our best to walk the way He walked and heal the way He healed and bring peace to broken hearts as He does, and we celebrate His first coming and we ache for His second.

And we remember, each year, the day when I AM stepped out of eternity and wailed His first breaths from a Jewish baby's lungs in order to live a life of anonymity and die a shameful death and rise in miraculous glory, to bring us a peace that will last long after time has ceased.

Happy Christmas.