Do You Hear What I Hear?

“Mom, did Jamie’s house get broken into?” our oldest son asked frantically over the phone. Alarm shot through me as I asked what he was talking about. He said he had gotten a text from his youngest brother saying something about “I can’t believe how cruel crooks can be at Christmas.”

Mark said he had tried to call Jamie, but couldn’t get through. “I’ll look on my computer and see if he wrote anything about it and try to call him!” I exclaimed, promising to let him know as soon as I found out. My mind was racing with fears of their Christmas being ruined, gifts stolen and other frightening scenarios.

I reached Jamie at a restaurant, sounding calm as anything. He laughed and gasped at my question. “Mom, it was only a joke. Mark didn’t read all my text! I’ll call him and straighten it out!” Turns out Mark had sent Jamie a box of gift pears for Christmas. Trying to be funny, our clever son had quipped, “Mark, I got a present from you, but thieves had apparently stolen the contents and left fruit in its place!”

Like they say, texted or facebook words don’t always convey exact meanings, and messages can be misleading or lose their comic punch as something is lost in the translation. We heard a few amusing remarks from the guest at a church service last night as he was leading us in Christmas carols and commenting from his keyboard.

“As a small child, I always wondered why shepherds were washing their socks by night,” he pondered. A little later, though, in a serious mode as we were singing, “Come, Now is the Time to Worship”, he interjected the phrase, “I’ll never know how much it cost Him, To be born in Bethlehem,” giving the worship song a Christmas slant.

I heard an excerpt of a story recently from something called the Protoevangelium, from the 1st century AD, giving an amplified version of Jesus’ birth. It was written long after the event, but in an imaginative way reflects some of the ideas people shared back then. At some point in Mary’s labor, Joseph supposedly leaves her in the care of a mid-wife and takes a contemplative walk under the stars.

As he stares in wonder at their brilliance and is overcome by the magnitude of what is happening in the stable (or cave, as the story goes), suddenly he has a vision of everything in fixed frame: People are eating and laughing, but their fork is frozen in mid-air. Their mouths are open, but still. Workers are holding tools aloft but the hammer never strikes the peg. The narrator likens the experience to a sense of life standing still at other momentous occasions in ordinary lives—the birth of a child, a marriage, a loss of a loved one, and so on.

Our sons may have had a miscommunication, and children may misinterpret songs, but the message of Jesus's birth rings loud and clear from our most reliable source, the Holy Bible. And what a beautiful message it is—time stopping, you might say, for our calendars hinge on that birth, marking time as “The Year of Our Lord, 20ll,..” the number of years since He was born. And now we all stop in commemoration of that most Blessed event to celebrate Christmas!