As I write this, Joyce and I are enjoying our annual flurry of Christmas activity: decorating our home, planning visits to and from our respective families and singing in choirs the special songs of this wonderful and special season.

And every Christmas, I pull out and read a commentary made by Harry Reasoner many, many years ago on 60 Minutes. Reasoner makes the point that God did well coming to us as a baby. He says man could have been put off by God’s coming as an in-place warrior, conqueror, judge, whatever. But it is a human trait to react positively to a baby.

I found it interesting that a similar understanding was expressed in an interlude reading in the recent Christmas cantata presented by choir members of Millen Baptist and Millen United Methodist churches a week and a half ago. It said that if our need was for information, God would have sent an educator; for technology, He would have sent an inventor; for entertainment, a performer. But since our need was for forgiveness, He sent a Savior.

And the fantastic underpinning of all this is that this mighty Savior, who is proclaimed as wonderful, counselor, the mighty God, came as a baby.

Talk about being made in human likeness!!!!

And once again this year, let’s just stand back and say: “Wow! What a neat idea!”

I don’t mean to be flippant. Not at all. But if this foundation of our faith doesn’t excite us, doesn’t just overwhelm us, we’re missing something! How in the world can we be negative, cynical, tired or miserable?

Sure, there is war, hunger, poverty, death, destruction, hatred.

Doesn’t this sound like the Christmas story? This baby whose birth we commemorate once again was born in a Middle East nation occupied by a foreign power. By all readings of the history of the time, the country was not wealthy; there was a great divide between rich and poor, there was hatred of the occupiers, and within a century, the very city and temple at the center of this country’s religion would be destroyed.

Yet, as we sing the words in Handel’s Messiah, not only is this baby, this Savior, called wonderful, counselor, the mighty God, but He is also called the Prince of Peace!

Into our world, as it is, comes this Prince of Peace just as He came physically into the same sort of world 2,000 years ago, not to frighten us into submission, but as a baby, a tiny child.

Nothing can take this away. As Paul would later write, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor spiritual powers, neither the present nor the future, nor cosmic powers, were they from heaven or from the deep world below, nor any creature whatsoever will separate us from the love of God, which we have in Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

So, as we celebrate this wonderful season, let us wish you Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Frohe Weinachten, MERRY CHRISTMAS!