Tuesday - second week in Advent

For years and years I taught Sunday School and one of my go-to activities during Advent was to have the children prepare the manger.  I kept a box of cut strips of paper near the door and when each child arrived they knew to take a few of these strips and on to write an act of kindness they had done the previous week on each.

Children take such activities very seriously and as they saw their acts of kindness begin to cover the bottom of the box and slowly add cushioning for the Christ child, they began to think harder and harder about what they could do to increase the 'straw' in the manger.

Each week before we began the lesson we would take a few minutes and share what acts of kindness could be done in the coming week: doing a chore without being asked, being 'nice' to a sibling, helping someone who needed assistance, giving another person a smile, letting someone go ahead of them in line, sharing a snack.  Like all good brainstorming, the more they shared the more ideas came about and each Sunday more pieces of straw were added to the manger.

Kindness is the action of love. Since it's the nature of love to expand and grow, this truth also applies to the actions of love: our awareness of love as a source of living grows in proportion to our ability to share it with others.  The children in my classroom saw this truth become real as the once empty manger gradually filled with the cushioning of small acts of kindness embodied on bits of paper straw.

God sent the long awaited Messiah into the world as a baby born in poor surroundings - an animal's manger in an unused stall - to ordinary people. Many, many people who had been waiting for the Messiah completely missed the truth of his arrival because they were expecting someone royal with the external trappings of power.  Instead of external power and might, they were given instead the greatest power that exists - a human being who lived completely from and with the love of God.

Jesus acknowledged his reason for being sent to live on earth in human form (like each of us) when he said to his disciples, "I give you but one command: love one another as I have loved you."  His disciples heard his words and to the best of their ability learned how, in the imperfect way of we humans, to live as Jesus showed them.  And the world was changed.

How is the world changed by love?  Exactly as the children learned as they provided cushioning in the manger: one act of kindness at a time.