Remember What God Began for Us

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Yesterday I wrote again about the carol, “Once in Royal David’s City.” Think back to the birth of your first child. I’m no poet, but I once paraphrased the first verse of the carol to describe bringing our firstborn baby boy home in February, 1979.

Once in Oxford, Mississippi,
Stood a nursery painted blue
Where a mother laid her baby,
In a bassinet that held her, too.
Filled with fear and also joy
I was mother to that little boy.

The bassinet that once held me and later John, Bethany, and Mary Evelyn now holds dolls created by my mother’s Aunt Edna. I love when our grandchildren ask, “Can we play with the glass babies?”

My experience is quite a contrast to Mary’s experience as Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander described it in the first verse of her carol.

Once in royal David’s city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby,
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little Child.

The house where we lived in Mississippi when John was born wasn’t fancy, but it was a grand mansion compared to the humble place where our Savior lay after leaving Heaven and coming to earth to become one of us.

It is a great privilege to bear a child, to care for a child, to rear a child, to love a child. What a joy it is for us mamas to remember the moments when that privilege began. Our privilege is great, but Mary’s privilege is hard to fathom. God Himself came down to earth, entered Mary’s womb, and was born in King David’s hometown of Bethlehem. No wonder Mary told her cousin Elizabeth that the Mighty One had done great things for her and that all generations would count her blessed (Luke 1:46-55).

I am grateful for the celebration of Christmas all around me with its reminders of what God began that day in royal David’s city — for you and me, for everyone we love, and for everyone in the history and the future of the world.

Have this attitude in yourselves
which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, although He existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant,
and being made in the likeness of men.
Being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8

Yesterday I wrote about A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College Cambridge. This is how the Kings College website describes the ninth reading at this annual service:

The ninth reading at our service concludes with this great declaration, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” The whole service leads us towards this great sentence: a sentence that invites us to remember that the one who created us does not stand aloof from our suffering, but shares it with us and somehow transforms it into peace of heart and mind, and an attitude of kindness towards others.*

Thank you for sharing the transforming message of God the Creator and Jesus the Redeemer with your children.

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through Him,
and apart from Him 
not even one thing came into being that has come into being.
In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind.
John 1:1-4

* https://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/a-festival-of-nine-lessons-and-carols

 

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