This has been a busy week! Hosted a Sock Exchange at my house for 27 ladies on Tuesday night and taught 10 4-6 year olds last night at church. Unfortunately, when I have a lot on my plate at once, I usually just tackle what is on the "front burner", so I knew I was in charge of giving the Christmas devotional at our Ladies Bible Class Christmas brunch this morning, and I had a general idea about what I wanted to prepare, but until my other 2 events were finished, I wasn't going to focus on it. So I got home from class last night and started looking through old computer files to find a old lesson I did in Texas that I could just reuse here in Colorado. Well, wouldn't you know I couldn't find it. I found another one, but it just wasn't exciting me. So I went to our Library and pulled the book from which I wrote the last devotional and was going to do it again, except when I started reading the material, it just didn't seem to be what the Holy Spirit wanted me to do. I couldn't get the thoughts to come on the page. By this time it was almost midnight. I asked the Holy Spirit to show me what He wanted me to do. I then pulled about 5 books from our Library and started looking through them. Then I Googled "Christmas devotional" and found a story by Max Lucado called "Gabriel" and then in one of His books that I had was "Mary's Prayer" and everything started coming together. I put some songs with those stories and called it good at about 2 a.m. Then this morning when I got out of bed I did the last thing on my list and that was to find the song "Mary Did You Know", as I thought it would go great with the "Mary's Prayer" story. Found my Mark Lowry book that has the song on CD in it, only for the CD to be missing. I thought I remembered that Clay Aiken sang it on his Christmas CD, so started hunting for it when I discovered 4 CD's that I had not yet loaded in my CD player that holds 50 CD's. So I loaded them, pulled out Clay Aiken's and was set to go. Putting on my makeup, the 2nd song that started to play was one I had never remembered hearing before, but it was beautiful and the words were perfect to add to the devotional this morning. I went and stopped the CD right away so I could pinpoint which one of the 50 it was. As it turned out it was "Emmanuel" by Point of Grace (it "just happened" to be one of the four I added this morning?) The Spirit then told me I should let people express prayer concerns for those whose holidays may actually not be happy because of deaths, or sickness, or whatever the circumstance. That is how we started the devotional this morning and there were over 25 people that we were able to bring before the Lord. Thank you Holy Spirit for the amazing way you spoke to me last night and orchestrated a devotional that put our eyes on our Lord ad Savior, Emmanuel. Here are the lyrics to the song:
She lit a candle in a downtown cathedral
Quietly confessing, counting all her blessings
She looked as if she had nowhere to go
I could see her weeping
Hands together hoping you would hear...
This is the time of year
We hold our families near
But God let us be a friend to the hurting
Oh Emmanuel, God with us
Spirit revealed in us
That we may be your hope to the world
Oh Emmanuel, God with us
With a light to break the darkness
That we may show your hope to the world
Emmanuel, God with us
I moved in closer just so I could see her face
Maybe she was a mother
Someone's only daughter
Her silver hair shimmered like the snow
Christmas bells were ringing
Now beside her kneeling I asked her name
(And she said)This was the time of year
I had my family near
But they've all gone and I have been so lonely
Oh Emmanuel, God with us
Spirit revealed in us
That we may be your hope to the world
Oh Emmanuel, God with us
With a light to break the darkness
That we may show your hope to the world
Emmanuel, God with us
So with my family that Christmas day
A girl of sixty years would laugh and play
And as we watched her dance our eyes were full of tears...
