Christmas, I think, is a day for everyone. Whether you’re a Christian or not. Sure, it’s a day of special celebration that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ. But it seems to me that God – as only God can engineer events – meant it for everyone.
That’s because God is primarily in the people business.
Regardless of how much we learn scientifically and intellectually about our universe and ourselves, somehow most of us end up back at God. Pretty simple really. We love our parents because we can see that we are part of them and that they provided for us when we couldn’t do so for ourselves. We love them as the years roll by because we increasingly see ourselves in them.
Just so with God. He is obvious.
We can look around the world and can clearly observe that it is not random at all. It is an incredible symphony of material and physical creation, intricate and planned to the last molecule, the last cell, and the last atom. We look at ourselves and see that we are each hand-crafted, molded with trillions of atoms and that we too are creators. Chips off the old block.
Personally, I do believe the Christmas story. I believe Christ was God, born into mankind as a Savior and a perfect Sacrifice that would allow us to receive what we could not otherwise possess – forgiveness and life everlasting.
While I think that is true, that isn’t Christmas.
Christmas is a day that carries across the days, the years, the centuries, and the millennia that which humans need most: Hope.
Hope in ourselves that we can reach for that which is bigger and better than what we are so often. Hope that life has a meaning beyond ourselves. Hope that the hard things we do mean that there will be a tomorrow better in some way than the day we leave behind. Hope that the evil that corrupts our own hearts and that we see in the world will someday end forever.
Hope. I think that is why we have a Christmas Day. I believe that’s why this is a day for everyone, and why the God of All Hope loves Christmas.