Okay so I’m not literally going to jingle.
Have you ever noticed the expression on a three year old’s face when they sing Jingle Bells complete with jingling percussive accompaniment? Priceless smiles and joy-filled enthusiasm!
Now I know you have looked at your calendar and realized that Christmas is l just a couple of days away. There is a lump in your throat and a feeling of panic beginning to settle over you. Relax! I’m here to share a secret I wish I had learned years ago. You may or may not believe me, it all depends upon how you are wired.
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I don’t know what I was expecting. World peace? The end of poverty?
But when I asked the six felons at the table around me what they wanted for Christmas, they responded in unison. “Papers!”
“Papers?” I naively asked.
“Yeah. Parole papers,” the one closest to me explained. “We want to be home for Christmas.”
Half of the men at my table were in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary prison ministry degree program. (Yeah, I know. It’s a mouth-full.) I questioned those three again. “But what about your degree? If you got out on parole-” They stopped me before I could continue.
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When Dean and I were dating and first married, our holidays were spent putting hundreds of miles on our cars as we drove to where his family lived for a couple days, journeyed an hour and a half to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering and back, and then spent time with some of his family before making the trek back home.
After we moved to the Northwest for seminary, we added plane travel to the itinerary, often driving an additional five hundred miles or more to make sure we got to visit as many people as we could. There was a lot of hurrying and scurrying, and not much in the way of peace or rest.
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