Planning Big, Thinking Small

by G. E. Shuman

Christmas 2012 is over.  In fact, by the time you read this column, it will have been over for over a week.  How strange that seems to me, after all the planning, preparing, procrastinating, and purchasing that went into it.  Hopefully, many of us did remember the true reason for the celebration.  Along with Christmas now past, another year has passed with it.  Like it or not, for better or for worse, whether over a fiscal cliff or into a prosperous new year, we have all begun the journey 'round the sun one more time.  The world did not come to an end on December 21st., so we must be meant to continue into 2013.  I do hope your new year is a happy and prosperous one.  (No, that's not the end of the column.  You can't get out of it that easily.)
Christmas was a bit difficult for me this year.  Our daughter, Emily, is sixteen now, and her brother Andrew is nineteen.  For the past few years there hasn't been much desire to have us read "The Night Before Christmas" and leave cookies and milk out for Santa.  Big surprise.  But old habits do die hard, especially when you have been 'doing' Christmas with your children for thirty-eight years.  At this point, in our family, some traditions are slipping into the past, and even the remembering of some of these things can become a thing of the past.   But, enough about the past.
We have always told our kids, as they have grown, to plan big.  "Get a good education, so that you can get a good job!" and "Don't let your grades in school determine your future!"   I stick by this advice, and always will.  Lately, though, I would also advise my children and yours, to think small.  In that, I mean to think past the 'big' things, the big job, the big home, the possible big bank account.   It has been my experience that the small things, the details, are the things that will be remembered most fondly when their family nest begins to empty, as is ours. I would tell them to spend every possible moment, day, and vacation with their families, and to work to live, not live to work.  I would also love to have our children continue our family traditions, and would advise them to add their own.  That way, times like Christmas and other holidays will be truly theirs, and belong to their family.
The new year is just beginning, and, so far, it looks to be a very trying one for our world.  If so, family, and family traditions may prove to be more important than ever before.  And, if times become tough, such things may be exactly those things that keep us together.  Our future may well rest on the simple acts of planning big and thinking small.

Mary's Christmas

Dear Readers, This is a reprint of my last-year’s Christmas column.  The reason it is here again is not entirely because of my busy schedule or tendency toward laziness.  The column generated many kind comments last year, and I thought you might like to see it once more.  Merry Christmas!

By G.E. Shuman

          I have occasionally been accused, (primarily by my wife) of not thinking like "other people."  I'm not sure if this is true, as I simply think as I think, and don't really know how other people think.  I do know that I like to mentally experience, or ponder the world around me.  I especially enjoy history and the things that have survived history and are still with us.  I think of things like the old house we live in, and about the fact that these walls, and even the nails that hold together the massive woodwork of the place, were right here, exactly as they are now, on the day I was born.  Likewise, they were here, just as I see them now, on the day my father was born.  Things like that, thoughts like that, ponderings like that intrigue me a great deal.  The antiques around me as I write tonight, including the house itself, are reminders that the days in which they were new were just as real as today is.  Each day had weather and sounds and smells and situations and pain and joy and people loving each other, and people hating each other.   If this is not how other people think, well, that’s just the way it is, and this is just the way I am.

          Today I have been thinking, in my probably odd way of doing it, about Mary, the mother of Jesus.  As a protestant Christian, I think about her son a lot, but not so much about her.  Today I have been thinking about what she went through for her son, and what she might have been experiencing in those days surrounding the first Christmas.  The Bible does not say a lot about Mary, and so the world knows little about her.  But she was a real, live, feeling, caring person.  She was also one without the benefit of history, to know the whole story of the very history she was helping to create.  Here's my idea of what she may have been thinking on part of that first, very real and rough Christmas day.

          I imagine that Mary might have awoken after a short evening's nap, to suddenly realize once again that she had just given birth.  Before rising she may have looked up into the rough rafters of the shoddy stable in which she lay, and pondered exactly what was happening to her.  Barely more than a child herself, here she was, with an infant son asleep in the stable’s manger, only inches from where she slept on the hay-strewn floor.  And this was not just a child, but one miraculously born from her own young womb, from her own virgin body.  He was a son for which she had been visited by an angel months before, who had proclaimed to her that the child within her would save His people from their sins.  

Mary may then have been stirred from her thoughts as she heard the baby move a bit, and whimper, where he lay.  Still unrested and uneasy, she was somehow comforted by her tired young husband's loud breathing as he slept in the hay, just to her other side.  She thought again of the angel's visit, and of the hard trip by donkey to get to this town of Bethlehem, so that Joseph could pay his taxes.  Mary could have then recalled the bumpy ride, the cold nights along the way, and her husband's smiling glances back at her as he led the beast upon which she rode.  She likely remembered the innkeeper's gruff voice and awful smell, as he told them to stay in the barn if they had to, and then slammed the door in their faces.  The Bible says that she thought about what the shepherds had reported.   Their talk included the angel which had spoken to them, and she might have wondered if it were the same angel as had come to her in that seemingly long-ago night.  She may have well imagined the heavenly host those shepherds described, and pondered their quick trip to this very place, to see her sacred son.  She remembered, only briefly, that agonizing thought of whether Joseph really, truly believed what she had said about the angel’s words, and of the bigger fact, that she had never known a man.

          Mary would have then arisen to pick up her tiny, sweet son from the manger hay, and then hold this most precious one to her breast.  How, as she did so, would she not have also wondered and worried for the future of this nursing infant child, this most Holy One, born in such a noisy, dirty place. 

          None of us can know what Mary actually thought during that wondrous night, but think she surely did, and maybe not like “other people.”  The stable, the cold air, the smell of manure, the hard ground and the soft and dusty hay were as real as was the night itself.  So also was her own body; real and sore and tired from childbirth.   She certainly considered that the greatest reality of all was that child, which she now held and felt in her arms, none other than the very Savior of the world.

"But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."  Luke 2:19.