Well, I somehow made it through another Advent/Christmas season, with all its extra services (13 since the first Sunday in Advent). I just have one more: an Epiphany Vespers service on Wednesday night.
But with the Christmas season winding down and Epiphany about to start, I’m not sure whether I’m glad it’s all over or wishing it hadn’t gone so fast. I am relieved to have the crazy schedule behind me. But at the same time, school starts back up again tomorrow, and so I’ll be back to that crazy schedule again, too. So while I won’t have multiple services each week for a while, I’ll be back to 3 catechism classes, 2 BIC classes during the week, and school chapel on Friday.
But I don’t mind the thought of getting back to that schedule. It’s Christmas I’m going to miss. It seems as though these 12 days are just not enough to get to the heart of what happened here. Incarnation. God made flesh. For us and for our salvation… It seems that you could spend a lifetime just dealing with these deep matters.
But it’s time to move on. To Epiphany. This morning I played through several of the Epiphany hymns and realized just how much I have to look forward to in the next few weeks. How Lovely Shines the Morning Star. To Jordan’s River Came our Lord. Hail to the Lord’s Anointed. And so on…
I would have been tempted to just stick with the Christmas hymns. Just the Luther and Gerhardt hymns alone would be enough for a lifetime, I think. But I guess it’s a good thing the church year keeps moving us along. So we don’t get stuck on just one thing. We’ll find that God has much more to reveal to us in his Son that “just” his incarnation. More than we ever could have imagined.
Blessings to you as we move on to another Epiphany.
A Shepherd's Story 