Christmas Rocks

            Only a few weeks until Christmas! Where is that shopping list? What does my budget look like? What can I pinch here to stretch to there? This Christmas is not at all like the Christmas when I was fourteen. That year my siblings and I had no money.  Out of ideas, we asked our inventive and practical father. If we wanted to earn some money, my father bargained, we could pick up rocks in the field for a penny a piece.   It was a deal!

            Our house was next to a five-acre field, which belonged to my father’s business. Every spring the field was planted with wheat, soy beans, or corn and plowed up in the fall. Like most plots of ground, the field had rocks, which didn’t enhance the growing process.

            So after school we took our buckets and walked the field. Pebbles and stones didn’t count. They had to be honest-to-goodness rocks. Sometimes our buckets filled quickly; sometimes only a couple rattled around in our buckets. Walking in the field wasn’t always easy, either. The deep cuts of the plow and the unevenness of the earth made our steps difficult. We were often cold, and daylight regularly ran away from us before we were ready to say goodnight to her.

            Day by day we gathered, counted, and then recorded our rocks on the calendar in the kitchen. At last we stopped collecting and added up the numbers. As I recall, our total was about fourteen hundred. Now that may not seem like much for Christmas shopping, but remember that was one thousand and four hundred rocks. Remember, too, that fourteen dollars went farther then than it does today.

            Those rocks were important and made Christmas gifts possible that year.  The original Christmas Rock made the first Advent possible.  Jesus Christ came to be our unmovable, unchangeable Rock (I Corinthians 10:4).  When things are in flux and uncertain, he is as solid—well, as solid as a rock. He is the Rock of Ages, the Rock the Church is built upon (Matthew 16:18). He is the Stone that the builders rejected that became the corner stone (Mark 12:10). Jesus Christ is the Rock that you and I can count on, depend on, and hide in when everything changes and fades away.

            This year, if your reality is different than your memories, if your circumstances have landed you where you never thought you’d be, if your heart feels like it’s broken beyond repair, or if the pain and disappointment you experience is excruciating, take comfort in the Rock. There isn’t anything that Jesus cannot help you with. There isn’t anything that you face that Christ will not share with you. Go, go to the Rock.