A Note From Tom: December 14th, 2012

Hey, everyone!  

Hope you’re having an awesome, “joy to the world” week! As the old carol says, “So why should men on earth be so sad, when our Redeemer has made us glad?”

Sadly, one of the sights that tells us “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” is that grumpy face with the grouchy expression you see everywhere.

“Who you talking ‘bout? All the hastled shoppers?”

Oh, no. I didn’t mean that! 

I was talking about the face of Ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge you see everywhere these days. You see that “grumpy gills” all over the place! The sad thing is that, even tho’ he was super mean for years…(Dickens described him as “…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”)… in the end of the book  he changed! Totally!  But people ALWAYS think of him the way he was at the beginning and not the way he was at the end!

At the end of the little classic, he “… became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world… and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

Wonder why they never show him that way?

Could you a imagine smiling, cheery, chuckling “Ol’Ebenezer”, giving a hand and a hug to a weary begger, or stopping to sled down the hill with the kids behind his house? I’m sure it happened! One of my favorite pictures of the end of the story is in a kids’ book that shows Scrooge and Tiny Tim sitting in the grass on a hill outside spring-time London, laughing together.

When a person really changes from what they shouldn’t have been to what, with God’s help, they could’ve been, I wonder why it’s easier to remember what they were than what they’ve become?

One time Theodore Geisel…ah, I mean, “Dr. Seuss”…got a letter in the mail asking him the change the name of the star of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, because “people always hastle us” about the book. The letter was signed, “David and Bob Grinch, Ridgefield, N.J.”

Bummer.

But Dr Seuss disagreed. “Can’t they understand that the Grinch in the end is the hero of the story? It’s not how you start out that counts, but what you are at the finish!”

Amen!

Here’s a good Christmas verse…”If anyone is in Christ, he (or she) is a new creation. Old things have past away; behold! All things have become new!”

That’s how God sees you! Not what you were! Not even what you are, really! But who you are in Jesus! Being outside of time, He already sees you as who you will be one day! Free! Faultless! Filled with overflowing love! All the time! The “You” you were always meant to be!

He sees you as the new “Scrooge”…the new “Grinch…that He always meant you to be when He put you in this world! 

It says in the last book of the Bible, that when we’re finally with Him in Heaven, “we’ll get a new name…” so people won’t remember you by the one you had when you weren’t fully the “You” you will be one day.

For all us “Scrooges” and Grinches”, that’s an awesome idea!