Not Yet!!!!!!

I saw in the news that the city of Independence had the lighting of the Mayor's Christmas tree over the weekend. I'm seeing Christmas commercials on TV. Merchants used to have the courtesy to wait until after Thanksgiving but not any more. We can do nothing about the commercialized Christmas. We can't stop it. But we don't have to be involved with it.

I'm not one to rant and rave about taking Christ out of Christmas. I don't think government needs to be involved in promoting the festivities. It is the place of the church to proclaim the "glad tidings of a great joy..." I'm not one to complain that nativity scenes are not allowed on government facilities. There are plenty of churches and Christians who can place such witnesses to our faith on our own yards.

But even with this aside, we need to individually look at how we will prepare for Christmas. Will we get caught up in all the materialism? Perhaps this would be a good year for each of us to plan ways of bringing out the spiritual celebration in our lives. We will soon be announcing the activities we are planning at Paradise UMC. These will include a Christmas Pageant by our Children, Christmas Eve Candlelight service, and we pastors will be preaching in the month of December about the Advent/Christmas message.

We will be suggesting ways that you and your family might be more involved in your home in a way that gets to the real message of Christmas.

But we aren't going to do that yet.
Let's have Thanksgiving first.


Pastor Larry