Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on
December 3, 2015.
As little children, we would dream of Christmas morn and all the gifts and toys we knew we'd find.
- David Meece
The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.
- Clement Clarke Moore
The Christmas season is a time filled with wishes and dreams. Christmas is a fabled time of magic where dreams come true. But the reality often falls very short of the fable. Dreams often don't come true this time of year, or any other for that matter. Sometimes we do get what we wish for only to discover that it doesn't fill the need or satisfy the soul. Family and friends return to their homes and visits end. The food is eaten and gone. Gifts lose their newness, break or even work just as they should and last a lifetime and still don't provide true joy, inner peace or the love that we so desperately need.
Magic is defined as the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces. So, in one sense the idea of Christmas magic is very real. In another, it is not. A supernatural force, actually The Supernatural Force, the Creator of all, has eternally altered the course of events. But there's nothing as simple as "apparently." Creation has been altered, really and truly altered. And the alteration is continuing its process toward full and complete restoration to what it was all supposed to be. There is a magic of Christmas available to us all this time of year and every day throughout the year. The magic is the supernatural power of God that started with the birth of Christ and finished with His death and resurrection that altered the course of our lives so that we can access the very throne of the Father, receive the power to become His children and have the Spirit of Christmas, which is the Spirit of Grace and Adoption known as the Holy Spirit, come and make His home within us and give us the power to do what we could never do before, walk with God and have relationship with Him. When our dreams are to have peace, joy and love in our lives despite what's going on in our lives and the world, when we dream of, wish for, long for a closer relationship with God and the time when we will spend eternity with Him, we can know that those Christmas dreams will come true. Not only will they come true someday, sometime in the future, but we can receive glimpses and tastes of them now. A tasty treat of the eternity to come that is better than all the sugar plums, gifts and toys of childhood dreams.
So today let us open our hearts and our lives to the truth of Christmas magic, the gift of grace wrapped in love that came with the birth of Jesus.
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