Shane Thayer

I’m ready for Christmas.  I have my tree up in the apartment, and the toys are getting wraped for the kids.  I think they will like it.  I bought four cornish hens and I am excited to make Christmas dinner.  I think I will be going to midnight mass Christmas eve.  I am excited for all of this.

Overall this year has been chaotic, but God has blessed me abundantly.  I got a new bible for Christmas it is a New American Bible.  I love it.  It is phenominal, and it is my goal to get through this one all the way.  I read the bible through when I was a young teenager, I had an old copy of  “The Way”  That was my fathers when he was young, and I still remember going to bed each night reading it.

My father had a huge impact on my life in spiritual matters.  I would have no passion for reading this Bible if it was not for him.  I still have the KJV  Scoffield Study Bible my partents gave me in the Christmas of 92.  It was just about the only bible I read for possibly a decade or so.

This Christmas has been nice.  I feel as if I am being given a chance to celebrate it in a way that I should have done for the last 30 years of my life.  As a child it was all about wanting and greed.  It was exciting, but really the focus of Christmas for me was Doctor Who books and toys, superheroes, and lego sets.  I still look forward to the Doctor Who Christmas specials which is nice to have that new tradition.  Now I am seeing a drastic shift in focus from Christmas being about consumerism and greed to a focus on Christ.  The birth of Yeshua is a new focus that I have not taken the proper approach to.

As a child I would always wake up before everyone and climb into my parents big old armchair with their family bible, and later that Scoffield I got from my parents and sit there to focus on the story of the birth of Christ.  I felt a little better when I could put him in the beginning of the day before my greed.

Now I see a need to focus on not just his birth, but as a whole the life of Yeshua and the profits foretelling of the Messiah.  I am going to focus on my family and those that I love and showing this love that he showed and told us to show.  Love as in the verb, the action.  Love as a noun does not work.   Love is something you do because he first loved us.

I have also been reading some of the Apocryphal Infancy Gospels lately.  This is some interesting reading.  There are many parallels between them that seem to support each other.  There is much to learn there about this season.  I will not dispute what is cannon, should be or shouldn’t be, but I will say that they are well worth your time and attention.