(We do not know the creator of this wonderful story, but are thankful for his or her contribution to our understanding of the essence of Christmas. Paul Harvey used this on one of his broadcasts when I was a small boy and I have cherished it ever since. If you know the authentic author of this story, please contact me.)
THE Christmas Story, the "God born a man in a manger” version simply escapes some people. Perhaps they seek complex answers to their questions, and this one is really very simple. So for the cynics, and the skeptics, and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable.
I want you to meet our main player in this story. He was not a Scrooge. He was a kind and descent man. Some would even say he was a good man. He was generous with his family, fair in all of his dealings with other men, but he just did not believe all that incarnation stuff which the Churches proclaim at Christmastime. It just didn't make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn't swallow the Jesus story, about God coming to Earth as a man.
"I'm truly sorry to distress you," he told his wife, "but I'm not going with you to church this Christmas Eve." He said he'd feel like a hypocrite. That he'd much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them, and so he stayed, and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away, snow began to fall. He went to the window and watched the flurries get heavier and heavier, and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper.
Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound, and another, and yet another. At first he thought some kids were throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They had been caught in the storm, and in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn, where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.
Quickly he put on his coat and goulashes, and tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light...but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in, so he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted, open doorway of the stable, but to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow.
He tried catching them; he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them and waving his arms. Instead they scattered in every direction, except into the warm lighted barn, and then he realized that they were afraid of him.
"To them," he reasoned, "I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. I'm not trying to hurt them. I’m trying to help them. But how?"
Any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be lead, or directed because they feared him.
"If only I could be a bird," he thought to himself, "and mingle with them, and speak their language, then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm ... to the safe, warm barn, but I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear and understand.
At that moment the church bells began to ring. Their sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind and he stood there listening to the bells ringing out ..."O COME, LET US ADORE HIM" ... listening to the bells peeling the glad tidings of Christmas, and he sank to his knees in the snow.
Merry Christmas
P Michael Biggs
Up-Words.net
Offering Hope
At Christmas
