Home For Christmas

“Home For Christmas”

“I'm dreaming tonight
Of a place I like
Even more than I usually do
And though I know it's a long way back
I promise you...

I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams”

“I’ll be home for Christmas . . . .”  It was something of a promise from a soldier stationed on the war front in World War II as Christmas approached.  Perhaps to family or a sweetheart; a promise to be “home for Christmas . . . if only in my dreams.”  Written in 1943 by Kim Cannon and sung by Bing Crosby it found its way into the heart of a war-weary country and remains a Christmas favorite even today.  “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Home, I suppose, as in “where the heart is.”  It is not so much a place on a map, although it might be, but perhaps more a place in one’s heart, “home.”  Someone has said that “home is where the heart is” and if that is true then we can nearly always be at the very least close to “home.”

Walter Wangerin wrote of “home” in his Advent devotional, “Preparing for Jesus.”  

“O Word by which the whole Creation came to be, we come to you in rags and tags and unembarrassed, because you, too, have chosen not royalty nor wealth nor power but the lowly existence of shepherds. Swaddled and laid in a manger, you are like us. We yearn to be like you.”

“Hush, mother Mary; we’ll watch for you.
Sleep while your baby is sleeping too.

He is a lamb both tender and young,
We will be shepherds to shepherd your son.

After his infancy, after his sleep,
He’ll be the shepherd and we’ll be the sheep.

O Mary, we’ll see to his happiness
Before his Father requires a death.

“Then he will call us by our names
And lead us all like little lambs Home.”

We can be “Home” in Christ and still be going "Home."  I suppose I can say that in Christ “I'll be Home for Christmas” and in Christ I will be forever “coming Home!”

I’ll be “home” for Christmas.  I pray that you will find yourself, if not “Home in Him” in this Christmas season, at least “homeward bound!”

Merry Christmas!

On the journey . . .

Pastor J K

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