Thoughts and Writings from the furnace by Kent Weathersby

Milk and Cookies

Now that the last carton of decorations has been returned to the attic, another Christmas season has come and gone. Before I share some warm sentiments on the holiday season, I, in full disclosure, have to admit that for me Christmas is exhausting! We have collected over 50 years of decorations, garlands, wreaths, bulbs, and now laser lighting features– all of which has to be retrieved and returned to their home in the attic in an area with the capacity of an ocean-going cargo ship container. That’s two round trips if you include transferring the empty cartons. There has to be labor laws restricting such harsh conditions.

And then there’s shopping. You can only buy 100%-cotton nighties and tops and size 71/2 house shoes for so many years. I’ve resorted to watching the Home Shopping Network for ideas. I’m sort of a big item person– cars, planes, golf carts, scuba gear, and the like; so wrapping gifts, some miniature, is the most tedious task of my seasonal responsibilities. And, Mrs. Santa has to approve the resulting presentations or its startsies-over. When I was a kid, all the gifts were laid out bare naked under the tree. Not so at our house. You need a robotic arm to retrieve the field of brightly wrapped treasures stacked two feet high over an area the size of a racket ball court.

All that being said, I think Christmas is a wonderful gift. No one ever says waiting for something to happen is as “slow as Columbus Day.” There is a quality of majesty in the fact that most of the world simultaneously relishes in what we have come to call the Christmas Spirit. With each passing Christmas most of us are imprinted with memories of the season and especially of Christmas mornings. I don’t know what I did on the 4^th of July when I was ten, but I still remember my tenth Christmas and the bow and arrows I found under the tree with which I managed to shoot my brother in the arm– just a flesh wound.

Christmas begins to tug at our hearts with the heresy of hearing Christmas music before Thanksgiving Day. After Thanksgiving, we wait for the Christmas Spirit to fall upon us. You can’t drum it up. As we march toward that magical day, plans to bless others who would otherwise not have much of a Christmas start coming together. There is great joy in driving through a trailer park and waiting to see who God brings into your path, rolling down the window and extending a large bill and then driving off without a word. The rear-view mirror tells the story.

Then, there is the decorating. Fortunately for me, the little girl in my wife loves transforming the house into a Christmas wonderland. My protests at having to climb a ladder at my age are totally ignored so my job is to hang lights on the dogwood in the front yard. I’ve considered breaking my arm to get out of that assignment, but have never followed through. This year while teetering on the top rung, I smiled to myself remembering the mandatory custom of leaving milk and cookies for Santa. On Christmas morning, before diving into our presents, my brother and I looked to make sure Santa had consumed our prix-fixe culinary tokens of thanks. Of course, he always did.

One Christmas eve, I became apoplectic when I learned that we had no Milk and no cookies to leave on the coffee table for Santa. My mother said, “No problem, we have cornbread and buttermilk.” Mom’s favorite snack was cornbread soaked in buttermilk which I presume is a West Virginia thing. I would never go near it and knew Santa wouldn’t either. Sure enough though, on Christmas morning, there was a plate with cornbread crumbs and an empty glass except for a film of buttermilk on its interior sitting on the coffee table– proof that Santa had acquired a taste for cornbread and buttermilk while visiting children in West Virginia over the years.

For those few weeks leading up to Christmas morning, the world is filled with cheer, harmony, and charity. Our thoughts are wrestled away from the mundane and placed on the happiness of others and the spontaneous joy of the season.

The Christmas Eve brushes with milk and cookies in my youth are not my only exposure to the topic. Just recently, I received a reply to one of the memos that asked, “When are you going to take a break from the Pollyanna, syrupy, feel-good milk and cookies stories and address something with depth. I have heard more about music, geography, flying planes, and furniture repair than I have about acquiring faith in God, if there is one.”

Feeling the slap of a white glove across my cheek, I accepted the challenge. The following thoughts on what may be considered matters of deeper substance derive from the questions that crossed my own stream of consciousness along my trek over the mountains, valleys, calamities, and canyons of time. All of us are responsible for reaching our own conclusions regarding creation, life, and eternity. If you are comfortable with and secure in your grasp of these subjects, there is no need to read further.

Even in childhood, I wrestled with such questions as: Who is God? Who am I? Why am I here? Why is the world I live in so fractured? How do I deal with eternity? And, how do I live? My explanations are strictly for my own satisfaction; as I have said, everyone is responsible to answer questions of this nature for themselves.

Because we have self-consciousness and an intellect, at some point and to some degree we all ponder existential questions that have interested, challenged, or plagued men and women since they have existed. Even the question of how the creation with its barriers of time and space came into being can’t be explained without revelation from a source outside those barriers. Many theorize, but no one can prove his theory.

Solutions to these conundrums are not obvious because of our psychological and spiritual blindness. We have to start somewhere and which path to choose is itself a conundrum.  I began with what is called the Bible, a collection of writings that, according to the Bible were written down and assembled by men who were instructed and inspired by the God of the Bible Himself; herein after referred to as God. Why did I feel I could believe the Bible? To some degree because of my religious bias having been brought up to be a Christian. I trust the Bible because of eyewitness accounts of Biblical events that have survived history and archeology. More importantly, I trusted the Bible because of prophesy. Events that were predicted to occur hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years later were fulfilled just as predicted even to the day in one important example. Great explanation in Dr. Alva McClain’s brilliantly lucid book, Daniels Prophesy of the 70 Weeks.

Having established for myself the authenticity and veracity of the Bible, I applied the questions posed earlier. Who is God? God introduced himself as YHWH which is translated “I Am,” and is often translated as Jehovah. When Moses was instructed by God to present himself to the people of Israel claiming to have been sent by the God of their fathers, he said to God “they may ask me ‘what is His name? ‘God replied “I Am who I AM.” “Thus you will say to them ‘I AM’ has sent me to you.’ (Exodus 3: 13-14) Actually, this is an amazing exchange; the name I AM says something about the nature of God– He is pure being! Other than to say that when “God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living BEING”, let’s let that go for now.

God teaches that He created the universe and in particular the Earth as a perfect paradisiacal place in which to begin a family for himself beginning with Adam and Eve. No work, food for the picking, and unashamed nakedness. Sorry I missed out on that. All God asked of them was to trust Him by believing Him when He instructed them that they “must not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:17) We all know what happened there. As a result of their lapse in trust, their very nature was corrupted. Shame, guilt, and subjection to temptation became facets of their personalities. Being driven from the Garden of Eden, they entered the alternative reality in which we live. Like the street corner guy’s sign suggests, we work for our food. Women bear children in pain, and we are subjects to the “lusts of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.” (1 John 2:16) It does not matter if this is allegorical or literal; it matters that this is how God explained it in a way we could comprehend it.

Both Adam and Eve became separated from the God with whom they had walked in the cool of the evening, from themselves because their eyes were opened to a reality for which they had no explanation, from each other as depicted by the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain, and from creation (we get sick and die, animals kill us, and the upheavals of nature threaten us), and from eternal security–they knew they were going to die but had no clue as to what would happen to them when they did.

God gave mankind another chance through the righteous Noah and his family. Because God saw that the inhabitants of planet had become so corrupt he would destroy them all with a flood and start over again with Noah, his sons, and their wives and children. All but Noah and his family perished in the flood. According to the plan, mankind was to start over and live a life of morality and humility. That didn’t happen.

In His mercy and wisdom, God devised yet another plan. He chose Abram and Sarai, who were later re-named Abraham and Sarah, to start a family whose descendants would outnumber the stars and would be the vessel for a new provision to restore mankind to Himself. The idea was to, over the generations, indoctrinate those descendants in the ways of God and to demonstrate the degree of goodness He required of them. Even today, God holds this family in high esteem– they are the apple of His eye. (Zechariah 2:8) God promised that at the right time, He would interject Himself into humanity in the form of a man, a Savior, the Messiah. (Daniel 9:25-26) That Savior would bring not only these descendants to Himself but all of mankind. However, there would be a catch.

After some false starts, the family took off with the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah. Isaac and his wife Rebecca had a son whom they named Jacob. Something very interesting happened with the introduction of Jacob. With his arrival, God began to frequently refer to Himself as “God the Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”. (Exodus 3:16) Why is this significant? Because man’s separation from God at the eviction from the Garden left an often vague and undefinable emptiness in his heart. In that place reserved for “God consciousness.” In the ensuing angst, mankind will create a God of his own fancy. That is why there are so many “gods.” God really narrowed it down as to who He is. Not just any god, but God the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The promised Savior would be a descendant of Judah, one of Jacob’s 12 sons. As referred to earlier, God even foretold the very day the Savior would appear. (Daniel 9:25-26) He sent a prophet, John the Baptizer, to prepare the way for the appearance of the Savior and even foretold the appearance of John the Baptizer–more commonly known as John the Baptist. (Malachi 3:1)

According to the Bible, that savior is, and was, Jesus of Nazareth. He is the fulfillment of the plan presented to, and established with, Abraham. Jesus fulfilled the plan, or covenant, with Abraham by His appearance. However, Jesus would institute a new plan, or covenant. The Old plan provided only for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, commonly referred to as the Jews. The new plan included all of mankind.

One reason for God interjecting Himself into humanity as Jesus is the reality that with the eviction from the Garden, sin (or a failure to reflect the purity of God’s character as did Adam before the eviction) entered the world through the evicted Adam, the “first man.” Sin is like a communicable disease, it spreads throughout all of humanity. That sin must be propitiated, or paid for, by a perfect sacrifice. In the same manner that under the old plan, the blood of spotless animals would disguise sin, the blood of a perfect sacrifice, under the new plan, would have to be shed to not only disguise but “blot out” the sins of mankind. Only God in the presence of His only son Jesus, the “second man” was, and is, the only perfect being and therefore the only source of sacrificial blood adequate to blot out our sins.

And here is the catch– just as Adam and Eve were asked to trust God’s word given in the Garden, we are asked to trust God’s Word now: “For God so loved the world that he gave His one Son that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life”. (John 3:16)

Since being cast from the Garden, man has been kidnapped and held for ransom– awaiting death, at which time he would be cast into the outer darkness for eternity. Under the new plan, not only would “believers” be ushered into eternal joy, they would be liberated from the oppressive powers of our enemy, the culprit that enticed Eve to sin. We can, in His power, overcome the power of sin and partake of His Devine nature.

If it sounds exclusive, I can only tell you what I took away from the Bible: “No one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6), and “Salvation is found in no one else and there is no other name under Heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. “ (Acts 4:12)  The creator has the authority to set the standards, requirements, and the consequences, not the created. I can’t even take down a tree in my yard without permission from the HOA. We are instructed to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. So, each one of us has the responsibility to address these matters. I am only sharing how I worked it out.

As for the higher philosophical questions as to who am I, and why am I here?: “He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The Swiss physician, Christian theologian, and prolific author Paul Tournier in his Book The Meaning of Persons and other of his works alludes to a cloud of futility regarding these deep questions. The same cloud that led the wisest man to have ever lived to refer to the search for deeper meaning as “All is vanity and a striving after the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:14) And what is the long and short of it all? “To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8)

Central to walking humbly with our God is the certainty that a ransom has been paid for our salvation by the shed blood of Jesus Christ. And that is at the heart of the Christmas season.

Now, back to the milk and cookies.

Kent