SHUT HIM OUT OR PULL HIM IN

It is two days away from celebrating the grand Birth Day and everyone is on high as it should be. And I am here trying to be good or that is what you think by doing some good acts of charity: to make few courtesy calls, say hi to few people around or whatever. And there you go. Going around the neighborhood, you meet a mother struggling with two growing disabled teenagers and a sick husband preparing to undergo a surgery with a tumor in the stomach, and you are expected to wish them to have a wonderful Christmas Celebrations. You enter into another house and here is a couple practically incapacitated, the husband immobile for the last seven years, neither can he move his lips to speak nor make himself comfortable on the bed to sleep. All he has is his eyes to communicate. And the wife seated on the wheel chair for the last five years with paralytic legs and broken hands. But you are there to wish them and the daughter who nurses them all the very best for the joyful celebrations. This must be a great joke. 

I am not been pessimistic or have any intention to be sentimental. I just see my situation, my helplessness and uselessness in these situations. I can avoid it and go about as though these realities don’t exist and preach wonderful Christmas sermons. But I felt a real sense of fulfillment- taking Jesus in the Holy Communion to these people, to be able to accompany them in a little way - to help them to put themselves in the place of Jesus – who was helpless, hopeless and lost on the cross and at the stable. Christmas for them will be to be able to be Jesus in some sense – totally dependent on others and for those who care will be an opportunity to be with the human face of Jesus. In this sense, we still have lots of rooms for Jesus at Christmas. You shut him out or pull him in. This will be our Christmas CHOICE.

Wishing you guys A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS from me, my table and chair.