Where Are You Christmas?

Today, after my usual busy 7:30am-3pm shift, I sat in the cafe and wrote thank you card after thank you card expressing my gratitude and appreciation for people's generosity towards supporting my year on NET. After about two hours, I finally allowed my body to relax and meet the back of the chair. With an aching back and a cramped hand, I couldn't help but be completely overwhelmed (as I have been many times during this entire NET process) by people's love, support, and encouragement and how each piece of this puzzle has fallen exactly into place where it was destined to lay.

As I looked around the store, intricately decorated to promote joy and market cheer, I thought about Christmas. How can it be, that the tiniest of babies, born in the humblest of stables, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid gently in a manger could have captured the angel Gabriel's attention who would implore the help of a star to which the wise men would follow to come bearing gifts for the vulnerable and helpless babe.
You know that song Where Are You Christmas? I think that we've found it, if we only look to the reason for the season. Christmas is found in the person at the drive thru window who pays for the person behind them causing a chain reaction of this random act of kindness for half an hour or longer. Christmas is found in the boy shovelling the elderly neighbour's walk way. Christmas is found by the packed churches that draw some kind of a special appeal for all those Christmas and Easter mass goer's. Christmas is found in the countless charities providing for the less fortunate. Christmas, in some strange sort of way, is found in the line ups at the mall of people who put their own wants on hold to exercise a generous heart for all their dear loved ones.

We love because Christ loved us first.