The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoners,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

To me this song adapted from a poem by Howard Thurman pictures a Christmas that does not have an ending…

Not when we have opened the gifts we received and tried them all on,
Or when we have kept the embellishments back into the storage room
Or when we stop playing soothing Christmas hymns
Or when we go back to our rapidly moving regimen
Or when we have changed the cheerful red and green trapping
Or when we have written our friends and loved one our heartfelt greeting.

There are people—those lost, broken, hungry, imprisoned, separated.
Maybe their very longed for 1st Christmas has yet to come.
Or maybe many have long given up that elusive Christmas dream.

Now tell me if you too think that the work of Christmas never ends,
Or where it ends, it begins again "like the waves in the ocean," then you have the message of the song in your heart.
Follow its music’s rhythm, rests, anticipations and even the hesitations. There is something in the music rousing us from our post Christmas slumbering.

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” Howard Thurman (American Theologian, Clergyman and Activist, 1900-1981)

Painting by Gordon Mitchell