Worth the Wait

Merry Christmas to all...
I wanted to share something I read today that gave my heavy heart hope. Enjoy..

The LORD is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.
Lamentations 3:25

The story of Christmas goes back to Eden. The day Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree, God didn't panic. He had seen this coming before creation. God went on record, foretelling a coming Messiah who would crush Satan's head and bring deliverance to God's people. And then, I imagine with tears running down his cheeks, God dismissed Adam and Eve from the garden.
I can almost see God standing by the forbidden tree, knowing that one day he would return to earth as a human baby, grow up, and let himself be nailed to a tree, bearing all the sin of this world in his own body. And in the moment of Satan's apparent triumph, he would turn around and crush him and rise from the dead to offer new, eternal life to all who believe.
Yet this promise of the Messiah was made thousands of years before Jesus' birth. Christmas is about an incredible promise God made to us in the distant past. It's about promise, and about waiting a very long time.

Toward the end of the Old Testament, God makes this sobering declaration: "I will search with lanterns in Jerusalem's darkest corners to punish those who sit complacent in their sins. They think the LORD will do nothing to them, either good or bad"(Zephaniah 1:12). Yet in t he end, not even the high priest welcomed baby Jesus into the world. Only a few shepherds ans some foreign dignitaries seem to have noticed God's arrival.
The high priest probably didn't believe God was going to do anything to change the status quo. After all, God hadn't done anything, as far as he could tell, for centuries. The prophets spoke no more. No one had seen a miracle for generations. For all practical purposes, God had disappeared. Few were still waiting with expectation.
Yet some were. Forty days after Jesus' birth. Joseph and Mary met a man in Jerusalem who had received God's promise that he would see the promised Messiah in his lifetime. Simeon longed to see the Christ child. The day it happened, he took Jesus in his arms. I can imagine him laughing, looking, wondering, God is that you? It is! You've come! At last! This baby is the Savior of all humanity! Now I can die in peace. Against all odds, at the end of Simeon's life, God had kept his promise.Anything worth having is worth waiting for. But it's so hard to wait.

-David Sanford

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water; and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
or grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry

Happy Birthday Jesus!!
Love,
Julie Peck