First of all, I’ve lived most of my life where the expression Happy Holidays wasn’t offensive, nor was Merry Christmas for that matter. It’s sad that either should be but I choose not to be weak and petty or easily offended. Life is too precious and too short to be walking on eggshells of political correctness. Let PC be damned for all I care!
It wasn’t an issue when I was a young child in the 1960’s and I refuse to give a rat’s ugly tail about it now. I certainly won’t allow people with no joy in their life to steal mine. This is a joyous season! Yet we have those among us that want to spread misery. To quote a now famous young darling from among their ranks, “How DARE you!”
We do however share a common bond with the PC establishment that ought to produce at least a nod of approval. I personally hate waste. We recycle. We, and I strongly include Melaleuca for their forward thinking corporate approach, believe in environmental responsibility. Every PC person on the planet ought to love Melaleuca. Much of what is called “green” however is a scandalous (highly corrupt) sham so we part ways from the green machine there. Green itself is good and R&D should be sought (we can achieve it) but I have a strong aversion to hypocritical virtue signaling and corrupt bullshit.
Okay, as I write this admittedly unusual holiday greeting and have fun doing so, it also comes at a time when I’m celebrating the holiday season for 40 years now as a follower of the Christ we are celebrating. I don’t know the exact date but take this day and go back up to within a couple weeks, somewhere in the middle section of November 1982 when I was just roughly a few weeks from my 22nd birthday, I was radically saved out of a very ungodly lifestyle. I was a mess but I’ve never been the same since.
I looked at my life analyically and forecasted a realistic projection of where I was going and didn’t like it. I didn’t grow up with any religion or church attendance, nor any knowledge of the Bible than what was common at the time (which was very little and usually distorted), just a belief in God and not much more, nothing that changed my life. That changed 40 years ago and I marvel at how long that’s been, passing so fast, and how different my life has been from how it would have been otherwise.
I discovered a simplicity to the gospel that gets largely missed and keeps people from having it change their life. I LOVE how the Message Bible puts it in the first 9 verses of Ephesians 2:
It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving.
That’s the simplicity. No one can do it on their own, but if you sincerely ask and let the Jesus we celebrate do it for you and in you, that’s life changing.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!