Christmas Seniors

We packed an “Operation Christmas Child” shoe-box today.  https://www.samaritanspurse.ca/what-we-do/operation-christmas-child/ 

I explained to Mom that it was for an unknown child, who lives halfway around the world.

Mom: “How will she get it?”

Me: “It will go on an airplane, and then travel by boat or donkey or elephant or bicycle or even on the back of a camel.”

Mom: “Such work to get a box into the hands of a little girl!”

She was moved to tears. I was deeply touched by her grasp of it all, but I should not have been. Like a lot of us, I was looking at The Home as a place of people with limitations, rather than focusing on what they can do.  It’s a form of robbery, really. We are stealing their last years, and depleting our best years, by not spending time with them.  If Mom can make a difference in the life of a little girl who lives so far away, so can you.  And all you have to do is enter The Home where seniors live. 

The Christmas Story, in Luke 2:21-38, introduces us to four memorable seniors.  Elizabeth and Zacharias were well-advanced in age; she was barren and then they had a son, John the Baptist, who was a cousin to Jesus.  Simeon was long awaiting the promised Messiah, and was told he would not see death until he had seen Jesus, at which time he spoke to Mary and Joseph about salvation and sorrow.  Anna was an 84-year-old widow who, upon seeing the baby Jesus, went out proclaiming redemption to everyone she met.  

They were godly old people, serving as the bridge between the end of the Old Testament, (Old Covenant) and the advent of the New- the Promised Messiah had come!  None of them resented the fact that the old era was passing away.  On the contrary, they were excited and moved by the tremendous joy of being proclaimers of Jesus’ arrival.  Seniors, loved by God and serving Him into old age.  They weren’t dismissed as too old, or too senile.

“Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another;

for he who loves his neighbour has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8).