Ebenezer

One of my coworkers at the store actually counted how many Christmas songs we have in the music overhead. She claims there are only twelve songs, endlessly repeated throughout the day. She finds it a peculiar form of torture for those of us who work there. She finds the one sung by Justin Beiber particularly repugnant.  I agreed and said that it probably violates the Geneva Conventions. Seriously now. I love Christmas music. It is everywhere you go now. I sing and hum along. My dear roommate/friend said my rendition of "I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas" went on for over an hour the other day. Off and on. Sung and hummed and whistled and so on. Oh my. Working on not doing that again.

There is a song that has been following me around this holiday season. I never thought of it as a Christmas song, but apparently it can be interpreted that way. It was one of my favorite songs back in the day when I attended church on a regular basis. I have heard it on the radio when I'm driving and in stores when I'm shopping. It has been years, but just like the scripture that I so diligently memorized, the words to those songs remain in my heart and in my soul. My view of life and the universe has broadened considerably from back when I believed in a personal Jesus, a heaven and hell, a black and white kind of existence. But who I was back then is a part of who I am now. The ebenezer stone in this song is from the Book of Samuel. It represents a new beginning.

Friday when the horror in Connecticut unfolded, I thought it so horribly unfair that I am so blessed. That I have so much in my life, that I am healthy and happy, with a wonderful present and an even more exciting future, when my sisters across the country were bereft of their little children. Their lives will never be the same. They cannot go back in time, to a time when their kids were alive. Friday marked a new beginning for them, one they didn't want and didn't sign up for. I was thinking how hard it would be just to get up every morning, if indeed they got any sleep at all, and face a new day. Their future looks bleak, but I must believe that there are good things ahead for them. We must make it that way.

Susan

"Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" written by Robert Robinson