Not Celebrating Christmas..!

Yesterday I sang a quartet piece with a family, who’d just lost their father, a strong powerful bass. The three, the mother, son and daughter invited me to sing in his place, and as I sang along, thoughts went through my mind. How easy it would have been for them to have said, ‘We’re not celebrating Christmas, because there’s a death in our family!’

Oh, I hear this very often.

Not just Christmas, but for many other festive celebrations as well.

But yesterday, the family continued doing what a dad and husband had started. He, as director of the church choir, had trained the choristers for the Christmas carol service, and then with a swiftness that left the whole city astounded death came a knocking and laid him low.

The family was grief stricken, the choir stunned, and the church could have felt there was no need to have a celebration of Christmas this year, except a ritualistic one.

It wasn’t so.

If one had seen the church last night, it looked more gloriously decorated than when used for a wedding.

What was it that changed grief to joy?

’Twas a  family, which believed the celebration of the birth of a little Child in a Manger, was actually a celebration of a definite hope and certainty that their father and husband was alive and well! Not in his earthly home with them, but in a far better place with the very One who had come down at Christmas, and had said, before He died, “I go to prepare a better place for you!”

The family, his wife, son and daughter knew the Indian Navy Captain, their dad and husband was in a far better place, and that it was apt, and right to celebrate this joy.

And they did.  

Oh yes, they must have missed his physical presence, and sometimes I believe God does want us to miss those who are close to Him, even as I who took his place in the quartet and made an error which the captain would have never made!

But the choir sang perfectly, the conductor, his son, was brilliant, and his wife and daughter with the sweetest of voices were melodious, along with the rest of the choir.

There are many who have lost loved ones this year, and this message is for each of them. If you truly believe in the Babe born in the Manger, then celebrate His birth, because it is that very birth that took place two thousand years ago, wherein lies the hope and certainty of reuniting, not for three score years and ten or a little over, but for all eternity!

So, this Christmas, whatever, your grief, whatever the missing, sing out and let them who have gone before, smile and whisper happily from the heavenly realm, “Thank God, they understand..!”

Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and author. He blogs at www.bobsbanter.com and can be reached at bobsbanter@gmail.com



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