A Savior is Born?

Reading the newspaper one Sunday, I commented to my husband that I don’t like reading the year-in-review articles that inundate headlines this time of year. It doesn’t seem like news to me. It seems more like filler; it’s as if there’s nothing else to report.

Then it hit me. Where were the Christmas Day headlines about the birth of Christ?

Every generation thinks it is remarkably different from those that have gone before them, so I was sure that headlines from a hundred years ago would have more of a religious bent—but I was wrong. Digging into newspaper headlines from the late 1800’s left me reading about shopping and current events. Of course, charitable acts of kindness were as popular then as they are today, but I couldn’t find any major headlines about the birth of Jesus!

Doesn’t it seem strange that here we have this huge event that millions of people have celebrated for over two thousand years and nobody even gives a brief mention in the newspaper of the One on whom it is founded? How can that be? Unless you are particularly astute and associate the charitable acts of kindness as an act of discipleship, it would be easy to miss the fact that Christmas is about the birth of Jesus Christ.

As we turn to celebrating Epiphany this week (the arrival of the Three Wise Men), let us hope that Christians throughout the world make it much easier for those who seek Christ, to find him, in 2009!

God bless,
Janet