The Christmas Fire

 

Although the twelve days of Christmas officially ends on January 6th, for most of the Christian world, the dim tail light of Santa's sleigh disappeared off into the night sky ten days earlier. By January 6th, some sweating in the gym at 530am are beginning to doubt that they'll actually learn to play the banjo or be able to do a technical presentation in French or Portuguese by years end. 

The real twelve days of Christmas is actually about thirty, ignoring the traditional count which begins on Christmas Day. Modern celebration and Christmas cheer hits full stride the week of Thanksgiving with bells ringing and chestnuts roasting. Well, except for those retailers who began hawking their yuletide goods in early October alongside the Halloween stuff. Even the Charlie Brown trees were eighty bucks this year, if you could find one. If you waited more than a week into December to buy a tree, you had slim-pickens or were shelling out some large. Serious fat stacks.

In the small town where I grew up, the edge of town was marked by a sharp, sweeping curve. As you left town, there was a dirty stone wall on your left and a row of five houses on the right. These were your typical asphalt shingle, coal miner homes built in the 20's or 30's. The adults called it skid row because it bordered a culm dump. There was a family that lived there in one of those houses. They had four kids. Wayne, Wally, Sally and Cathy. Wayne was tall, strong, handsome and well spoken. Sally was dark-haired, shy, brooding and afraid. She had a buster brown haircut. Wally and Cathy both had disabilities which made  Cathy was blonde and boisterous and Wally seemingly care-free.  They were poor, but they did have a home.

My friends and neighbors, both the kids and adults, treated them in one of three ways. The first group had empathy for them. Out of compassion and kindness, they gave what they could without judgement. The second group mistreated them with words or actions, out of judgement and disdain. To the third group, they were invisible. It was easier to look over that dirty stone wall out the window of the car and wonder if anyone would ever clean up the culm dump than to see the old man drinking on the porch of the house with a front door that was never closed.

"For he never thought of doing a kindness, but hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted."

For some  this year, Christmas meant a trip to the hospital, dinner alone or at a funeral. For others, it meant your house and all the presents in it, were burnt to the ground. Your whole town, in fact. The cozy memory of a roaring Christmas fire now conjures a completely different image for the residents of Superior Colorado.

Heartbreaking as these devastating fires are, we do witness the good in the world. Donations are pouring in by the tens of millions, even if some are misplaced. An Instagram effort aimed at raising money to aid victims of the Boulder County Colorado fires erroneously sent more than $250,000 dollars in donations to Boulder, Utah. 

Outside of Manila in the Philippines, there was a landfill called Smokey Mountain. It was home for about 30,000 people that made their living and survived by picking through the landfill's rubbish. People I knew went there in the early 1990's and volunteered. They came back changed people. Some for a month, some for a decade, some for a lifetime. They understood poverty at a completely different level. 

What shocked them even more than the extreme filth was the joy of the children who lived there and their ability to survive in such deplorable conditions. Despite their circumstances, they said most of the children seemed happy and played like ordinary kids.

From that day on, the invisible surrounding them suddenly became visible. They realized nothing they could do or give would ever be enough, but that was no reason not to try. They experienced the true Spirit of Christmas that Ezekiel describes so well.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

Yet even amongst these, with their newly transplanted heart and renewed view of the world, there are others who still rise above that. These are the ones who see poverty and pain and need in February, May and September and act on it. 

Surely men and women such as these have obvious talent and success, but they also have pain and hardship as setback and loss just like the rest of the world. Those that see the invisible have something else, also invisible. Something special that makes the world tolerable when it seems unbearable.

These are the ones who have the Christmas Fire burning within them all year round. 

Of them it is written:

Good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. Surely the righteous will never be shaken; they will be remembered forever. They will have no fear of bad news; their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the Lord. Their hearts are secure, they will have no fear; in the end they will look in triumph on their foes. They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor, their righteousness endures forever; their horn will be lifted high in honor.