Let me start off by saying this was supposed to be for last Sunday, but things got rough over the last week. So, you’re getting it this week instead since I finally have time to type it up and get it posted.
I have to revisit the snow thing from two weeks ago. Why? Because it snowed! Not that I like driving in the snow, but it should stick around for Christmas with this whole polar vortex thing that happened. It got down to twenty degrees below Fahrenheit last night, for pity’s sake. I am happy for the snow. It’s starting to feel like Christmas. Which means I really need to get moving getting stuff done. And I can lose this insanely cold weather, too.
Once again, I was sitting in church and something hit me. We Christians focus on Jesus and his immaculate birth quite a bit on Christmas. But, what about Mary and Joseph? What was going through their minds with all of this? How much had their lives changed because of God’s plan for them? How did they find the strength and courage to follow through with something they knew was going to be huge? They had to have some guess that the road they were about to walk would not be easy. And what about siblings? Was Jesus their only child or were there other children? What happened to the other children of Mary and Joseph, if they existed? While I have no idea if the answers to any of these questions exist, I know as a parent that they did something amazing. Something that I am not certain I could have done in their shoes. It reminds me that the Christmas Story is so much bigger than we tend to think about.
I’ve been having to brush off my dusty editorial skills lately. Not the technical stuff. I never have been very good with that. I mean more of the developmental type stuff. I’m working on an anthology with some people and had to work through a handful of the submissions to determine who should move on in the process and which stories should be rejected. I won’t make the final decisions, but I get to help winnow down to the final candidates. It has been interesting to work on again after many years away from something like that.
Part author, part artist, all dreamer 