My Christmas Wish for you
I pray that you find yourself in good health, in safe surroundings, comfortable from your own endeavors and surrounded by the love of friends and family members throughout the New Year.
This year, 2023, has been tough for many, if not all of us. But be of good cheer, as of tomorrow, we are one week from starting a new year, one full of hope and opportunity.
So it was 2,000 years ago when the world was all in darkness. Darkness is a good word to describe the way people feared the world they lived in. Nature was full of mysterious forces that ruled the earth and the best way men had learned to live together was by the way of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Men feared one another. Life was hard and death was easily found, often cruel and always final.
But then a man was born in Nazarene who would come to show the world a new way of viewing life in this world and a new way of living together in peace. That man was named Jesus.
Today, whether or not you believe him to be our deity incarnate, as many do, it has been demonstrated that the message he brought us was, in itself, divine. He had discovered the way for people to live together in more peace and prosperity than any could have imagined . . . a way for humanity to bring the blessings of heaven to Earth.
And what was this shocking new revelation, this idea for which we venerate him two thousand years later and still struggle to achieve, each of us, within our own souls?
When a lawyer asked what his most basic idea that all laws were based on, he answered:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mark22, 37-40)
Although he did and said many things, this was the essence of a divine idea, a revealing of a natural law, literally a gift from God for how we should act and what we should become as a people that we are still struggling to understand and abide by to this day.
But we have made strides toward it. We have come a long way in our journey toward a Christmas Spirit that lives among us throughout the year. We’ve come closer to realizing that ‘the Lord thy God’ is the one living Spirit that exists on the Earth and that each living entity, including us, are all a part of. To Love God, is to love Life itself.
However, the second commandment has proven so difficult for us to understand and follow. How can we love our neighbor when we don’t even understand ourselves? You cannot love what you do not understand and the things we’ve been taught and are teaching our children about our essential nature today are so confusing and contrary that even just respecting our personal identity, let alone loving it, has become difficult to impossible. Thus the hatred we see in daily lives and newscasts are wide spread . . . and spreading.
But every step we’ve made creating societies that respect each individual’s life and livelihood regardless of all personal characteristics have brought more prosperity and happiness to more people than ever before thus adding evidence that Jesus was right.
One of the greatest achievements of man was to create a society based upon the principle that all men are created equal, that everyone has a right to exist and earn their own living and that society as a whole must be dedicated to protecting all individuals equally under a single rule of law; The Constitutional Republic of the United States of America of 1789. A society based on the ideal of ‘one for all and all for one, under God.’
That is the greatest gift we’ve been given as individuals, to live in a country, a society so designed and dedicated. It is ours to protect, to sustain and to grow so that our children may benefit from its blessings of prosperity and brotherhood.
So rejoice and be glad. In spite of all you hear on the news, this New Year gives us another chance to set America back on the track toward finding and following Jesus’ commandments and lead us toward a brighter happier future of peace on Earth and good will to all mankind.
30
JC Rogers
