I LOVE Christmas!  I am not a very naturally exhuberant person, not just all happy and light-hearted, but give me a vision and some understanding and I come alive.  My Holy-Holiday-Calling is to remember and release a spirit of rejoicing in myself and in others as we make Jesus Christ and worshipping Him central to our raucous Christmas celebrating!

Between Steph and Tristan’s house just a couple of miles east of us and my house as you travel back on Bridge, you hit Brighton’s “high point,” which isn’t very high – as we are in the valley of the great Rocky Mountains.  But there it is.  And even in this recently rural-and-still-small, but-booming town, suddenly, you reach the peak and there they are: the lights!  And especially in these long, dark nights, Christmas lights line streets and neighborhoods have come alive with twinkle.

Some one asked me recently why on earth people would still put their lights out with the world’s problems and the economy the way it is?  If they had heard Guini the other  night when we drove the kids around Brighton to see the lights, they would understand.  For she and Gavin and Hunter oohed and awed over every single light.  But Guini, each time she spotted a lit up star (and especially the really large one atop the 100-foot tree at the City Building, would scream, a la Buddy in the movie “Elf,” “CHRISTMAS!  CHRISTMAS!  Star!!”

Yes, there are hosts of people all over Brighton and Denver and Colorado, all over our nation and the world who are celebrating, whether they even yet understand it or not, that the Light has come and the darkness can never be the same!

Isaiah 9.2 “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death – a light has dawned!”

John 8.12 “Jesus said, ‘I am the Light of the world.  Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness, but will have the Light of Life.”‘

I love the lights of Christmas!  And every twinkling light, every candle we light during this season is piercing a darkness that would otherwise be there and is representing that Jesus is the Light of the world!

Living in great light…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  More candles. 

pictured: part of Dave’s Bedford Falls town