I barely know most of these ladies. While they meet
for Sunday school, so do I – but I’m with a group of 5th graders and
they are with each other. It makes it
more difficult to know them. Not
impossible, though. Because every year
they have a Christmas party and they invite me.
I’m not much for turning down parties, so I go. This year’s party was last night. In the spirit of full disclosure, you might
as well know that I have to relearn some names every year, but I’m getting
better!
These ladies who make up Peggy Kendrick’s Sunday
School Class – what can I say? They are
a special group. Every year, our sweet
hostess says her house is too small for the group. Every year we say that we wouldn’t want to be
anywhere else. Every year, we have a
feast because there are some good fantastic cooks in this bunch. Where else are you going to get amazing rolls
that take two days to make?! Every year,
we have a devotional and last night was a really special one – borrowed from
Paul Harvey, no less. (It’s included at
the end of this post if you would like to know why Jesus came to earth as a
human baby.) Every year we pray – we give
thanks and we ask for blessings for others.
And every year, we have a gift exchange that confuses most of us and
keeps us all laughing.
This group of ladies has included me even though I
meet with them once a year. They are fun
and friendly and loving and, best of all, they love the Lord. They like to laugh. I like to laugh. Perfect match right there. Our Christmas parties usually end when
someone has to leave for whatever reason.
I’m willing to venture that not many parties ever broke up because someone
announced, “I’m out of oxygen. I’ve got
to go.” Ours did.
I don’t know much about how Sunday school classes are
formed. I don’t know the protocol for
assigning someone to a class. Here’s
what I do know: The ladies of Peggy
Kendrick’s Sunday School Class will take you in and love you to pieces. If you are looking for a Sunday School class,
this one comes highly recommended.
Courtesy
of Paul Harvey – just in case you are wondering why Jesus came in human form:
The man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a
scrooge, he was a kind decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright
in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation
stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense
and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story,
about God coming to Earth as a man.
“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not
going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a
hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up
for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow
began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and
heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his
newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound…Then another, and
then another. Sort of a thump or a thud…At first he thought someone must be
throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the
front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the
snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter,
had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and
freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That
would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.
Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the
deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but
the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried
back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a
trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay,
the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in
the snow. He tried catching them…He tried shooing them into the barn by walking
around them waving his arms…Instead, they scattered in every direction, except
into the warm, lighted barn.
And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. To
them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could
think of some way to let them know that they can trust me…That I am not trying
to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to
frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led
or shooed because they feared him.
“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to
himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell
them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safe, warm…to the safe
warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and
understand.”
At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound
reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to
the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of
Christmas.
And he sank to his knees in the snow.
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