Tag Archives: overshadowed

Celebrate

Celebrate: (v) to acknowledge a significant or happy day or event with a social gathering

The reason needs to be larger than the plan.

I have often attended celebrations where the actual organization of the event overshadowed the purpose for us gathering.

I sometimes feel that way when I go to church. We forget that the real significance of clumping is to strengthen one another, build up our
confidence and share a common testimony of faith. Yet by the time we get done with candles, musicians, sound systems, bulletins, announcements and special music, the beauty of the conclave seems to get swallowed up.

What is it I’m celebrating?

I would agree with Kool and the Gang that I can celebrate good times.

Celebrate another day of living.

I love to celebrate that evil viciously appears to be dominant until it’s suddenly snuffed by its own greed.

I like to celebrate that something can be non-existent and because I’m alive, the creativity I’ve been granted can make freshness appear.

What are we celebrating?

Some of the holidays that hang around baffle me. I’m certainly grateful for the Armed Forces, but how many times are we going to salute them every year? And does every celebration in America have to be accompanied with a protracted exercise in gluttony?

I celebrate that even as I write this, all across the world there are people I will never know who read it–and out of their English grammar propriety, feel completely licensed to rip it apart.

What a wonderful world.

That’s what we can celebrate–with all its madness, diversity and pending doom and gloom, life still manages to give us a daily clean canvas, available for beautiful painting.

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Annunciation, The

dictionary with letter A

Annuciation, The: (n) announcement of the Incarnation by the angel Gabriel to Mary (Luke 1:26-38)

Angels have personalities.

I suppose one has to believe in angels or accept the concept of personality.

We know they have some sort of thinking process– one-third of them decided to rebel against management and ended up earth-bound. (Sometimes I think we fail to realize that losing a third of your personnel is a pretty heavy indictment against the employer.)

So I wonder what Gabriel, an angel in good standing, felt like when he was instructed to go to Earth and tell a young, teenage girl that the Holy Spirit was going to overshadow her and that she would bear a child, and even though the offspring would be the Savior of the world, for the first nine months, it would be a much-unwanted pregnancy.

I’m not so sure that a young, Jewish girl in that time would have been aware of the procreative process. So did Gabriel get stuck explaining sex and God–in the same visit?

Or were young girls of the time so confined within tiny, stone huts that actually, Mama and Papa’s evening groanings needed to be explained earlier than usual?

But I will tell you three positive things:

  1. Only a teenage girl would think it was cool to have a baby. If God had caught her any older, she would have been more rational.
  2. Only a young lass would have the faith of a child and the optimism to think that God really saw her personally and wanted to bless her uniquely.
  3. And only Mary stands out singularly as the woman that God chose, to birth the promise of the ages.

What a difficult assignment it was for an angel to annnunciate the heart of God into the fragile mind of a superstitious, adolescent and poverty-stricken little girl.

It is so much the story of humanity–with all of our technology, intellect, pursuit of knowledge, political maneuvers and theological profundities, it is still one single person believing in the unbelievable … marching us forward.

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