I just love these last few days before Christmas – they’re like the twilight before Christmas Eve. The world starts slowing down, stores close, Christmas Tree lots empty, we pack up and travel towards loved ones. It’s like the moment in the theater when the house lights go down…just before the curtain comes up. And everyone quiets and you settle in your seat with anticipation to focus on what’s about to happen.

It’s really pretty amazing that the entire world still settles down in the twilight of Christmas Eve, and waits, focusing (intentionally or not) in anticipation on what’s about to happen. And all the Santa Claus’s and “holiday trees” and commercialism and mind-numbing repetitions of dogs barking “Jingle Bells” can never diminish in any way the true meaning of the event about which the angels sang. Because what happened was God breaking through all dimensions of time and space and matter to become a living, breathing part of this very world, and that event changed everything…forever.

I love the words of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear that say, “the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.” The world still falls to solemn stillness on a Christmas Eve…as it should be. But actually, we’re just at the Intermission here in this little theater of earth. This particular song also looks ahead, to the final act. Pretty soon the houselights will come down, and we’ll settle in and focus with anticipation “when with the ever-circling years shall come the time foretold…and the whole world send back the song, which now the angels sing.”

Have a beautiful and joy-filled Christmas.