Merry Christmas everyone! I hope that all is well with you and that you and your family had a wonderful Christmas celebration. I'd like to share my Christmas story with you. Well, first off, I was supposed to be going to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for Christmas. My family and I were going to stay in a beautiful condo with our cousins, and enjoy amusement parks and other fun things. But plans changed. My family stayed right here in boring Florida.(No offense to those of you who like Florida.) And our cousins stayed in the condo without us. At this point, I'm going "Lord, I hope there is a really, really good reason for this." In short, I wasn't very happy. Christmas Eve was a very stressful day, filled with cooking, no snow(after spending four and half years in Alaska, the no snow thing is really weird), no friends, and no family. Could it get any worse than this. Hmmm. Christmas morning, my dad was on the phone, and his face was very grave. It would appear that one of his people was in the hospital with severe tuberculosis and the guy's mom was in town. Guess who she spent Christmas breakfast with? Us! We've never had good friends, let alone strangers, over for Christmas. But when our surprise guest arrived, I realized what we were doing. My family was ministering to a needy soul on Christmas day. We were sharing the love of Christ with an unsaved individual. Of course, I began to feel guilty over my previous selfishness. Caught up in what I thought Christmas should have been, I had forgotten to dwell on the real meaning of Christmas: Giving and sharing what the Lord has blessed us with. Later on that day our guest and her daughter came back over for Christmas dinner, and we all had a wonderful time. And her son is getting better! The end.
Happy New Year,
Alena