Restoring Kingdom Builders

What is your favorite Christmas experience?

Looking back over your life, when have you had a joyous, spine-tingling, I-want-to-freeze-frame-this-feeling-at-Christmas-forever moment?

I’d like to share three of them with you from my own life – and then mention one I’m still waiting to have.

Moment Number One happened when I was ten years old.  That was the year I received a three-inch reflecting telescope for Christmas.  It meant a lot to me because my father had to work two jobs to earn the money to buy gifts for us that Christmas, and I knew how much love stood behind that gift.

I spent many hours looking at planets and star clusters and the moon in my backyard.  Months later, I took the telescope to Lake Mead, rose in the middle of the night, and explored the heavens without any interference from city lights – moments made possible by a Christmas gift from generous parents.

Moment Number Two happened a few months after Kim and I started dating.  We drove to a section of Long Beach called Naples and walked up and down the canals, admiring the Christmas displays on the waterfront homes in the cold.  Afterwards, we ended up at Bob’s Big Boy for hot chocolate.  We repeated this little tradition many times in the years to come.

I’ve seen many great displays of Christmas lights over the years, including a cul-de-sac where every home was decorated and an entire street where people drove their cars past colorful displays around them.  But to me, the displays in Naples were the best.

Moment Number Three happened at a church in the early 1990s.  The churches I grew up in did not offer Christmas Eve services.  A few years after I became a pastor, I asked the church board at our Silicon Valley church if we could hold a Christmas Eve service that December.  The board chairman told me that we could do it, but he would not come.

Evidently others felt the same way.  The night of that first Christmas Eve service, 15 people came out in a furious rain storm – and my own family didn’t even show.  I guess the board chairman was right after all.

Undaunted, we kept trying, and a few years later, several hundred people came out – including that board chairman and his family – and the services were always meaningful.  More importantly, we put Christ at the center of His own birthday.

God has blessed me with many other wonderful Christmas experiences, but those were the ones that readily came to mind.

But there’s an experience I still want to have, one that a friend had years ago.

Every year, on Christmas Eve, a group of pilgrims are escorted along a trail from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, a distance of about five miles.  Along the way, they come to the traditional site of the field where the shepherds heard the angels proclaim Jesus’ birth.

Of all the Christmas characters, I identify most with the shepherds.

I’ve never been king of anything, so I can’t relate to Herod the Great.

I was married when my first child was born, so it’s hard to feel Joseph’s pain.

There has never been a time when I’ve ridden on a camel, or followed a unique heavenly body, or had any gold in my possession, so it’s hard to fathom what it’s like to be one of the magi.

But I can easily imagine what it’s like to be a shepherd.  They were poor, isolated, forgotten men who engaged in a repetitive job and worked with relatively unintelligent beings – and they had a lot of time for self-reflection.

I once had a picture of modern-day Bethlehem that I looked at continually.  Just once in my life, I’d like to stand in that field and sense what the shepherds felt when the angels announced their Messiah had come to earth – and was hanging out in a nearby stable.

My favorite Christmas song is O Holy Night:

Fall on your knees

O hear, the angels’ voices

O night divine

O night, when Christ was born

While I cannot go back in time and experience what the shepherds did … and while I may never be able to see that field firsthand … I’ll go there again in my imagination this Christmas, and thank God that I have heard the good news about Jesus and that He is my Savior and Lord.

Do you have a special Christmas experience you’d like to share?