SUNDAY SERVICES:

Black Friday.

Small Business Saturday.

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Cyber Monday.

Giving Tuesday.

Just a cultural reminder that Christmas is coming. Our civic liturgy for the season’s inauguration begins annually at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Parade, when Santa and his entourage let us know that the Feast of Thanksgiving is meant to feed and fuel us for the celebrating, decorating, entertaining and shopping to come. The TV litany of 1960s stop-motion reindeer, Snowmen and Mickey Rooney Kringles quicken the pace as commercials for recipes, automobiles, and hugging families in the snow bring us to the brink of the Feast.

“You can’t wing Christmas. Procrastination is not part of the holiday spirit. Christmas requires preparation.”

This won’t surprise you. Automated customer service can be tedious.
“Press 1 for this. Press 2 for that. Our menu has changed.” I have learned that if you purposefully mumble your responses or just sit quietly, you are transferred to a real person faster.

“It’s my life isn’t it?”
Danny and I sat on the front step watching the black line grow on the horizon – a tornado warning had been issued and he wanted to be ready. I had a Bible of some translation in my hand, he a pistol of some caliber in his. Danny had been buried in a basement of a strip center when the last tornado blew through town and that wasn’t going to happen again. He was 16 now but his father’s death of just a couple years before, he jumped off the Ohio River Bridge, was still burning in his heart. Suicide, why not? “It’s my life isn’t it? “Well, actually, no it’s not, Danny,” or something like that, I responded. “You have been bought with a price, it’s not you who live but Christ in you – it’s not your life, like it or not.” I’m pretty sure that is not an exact quote, but it was what was in my mind that spring afternoon. Danny is alive and well today, still living a life, I trust, not his own.