The most important thing

With the Christmas season well underway here, especially with Shepherdstown celebrating its 250th birthday with a big kickoff that included a parade yesterday, ice sculptures around the town, holiday marketplaces full of greens and hand-crafted gifts, chestnut roasters, roaming carolers and more activities than any one person has time for, spending yesterday morning working at our church open house offered a perfect time to take one step back from all of those wholesome and fun activities, retreat into the beautiful sanctuary of an old church that no doubt served as a hospital after the horrible battle of Antietam during the Civil War, think about those 250 years being celebrated and the 2012 years we, as humans, have celebrated Christmas in one form or another.


Our church has an extraordinary display of family nativity sets, each one different from the other. From the construction paper and craft materials one made by the kids in Sunday School to ornate ones handed down through families, from the simple to the complicated, each is a reminder of the most important thing about this season.


Many weeks ago, our wonderful pastor Dee-Ann, in her Sunday morning "time with the children," was illustrating what it might look like if we put God, the most important thing, first in our lives. She had a jar, a bag of rice, and a container of cinnamon. She called the cinnamon "the most important thing." The rice was all of the other important things in our lives. When she poured the rice into the jar and then tried to make the cinnamon fit, it wouldn't. None of the children thought it would work the other way around -- but it did! If she put the cinnamon -- the most important thing -- in first, then the rice all fit around it. It took some shaking, to be sure, so that the rice would settle. But in the end, what she showed us was that if we make God the most important thing in our lives, then all of the other important things will still fit in around Him.

I thought of that as I looked at all of the nativity sets from many families and many countries and thought of Dee-Ann's time with the children, which always teaches me a lot. Now I am very clear about what "the most important thing" is at Christmas, but I know that all of the other important things will still fit in around it, and nothing important has to be left out. Nothing at all.