The KRCS Lower School collected school supplies for the mission school in Sierra Leone (SLIMS) on the 100th Day of School. Thanks again for sending in all those dry erase boards and markers. These pictures say it all!

Do you remember the sweet letters our class received from these second graders?

The children were surprised at how we could cut paper and twist it into a wreath.
Wreaths represent the eternal nature of God’s love.

The Man and the Birds

Each CHRISTmas day at 12:00 noon where ever Paul Harvey’s Program is played on the radio, Paul tells this story in such a dynamic way that it is sure to touch the heart of any person who listens to it.

Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as My Christmas Story, of “The Man and the Birds”.

You know, “The” Christmas story, “God born a man in a manger”, and all that, escapes some moderns.  Mostly I think because they seek complex answers to their questions, and this one is so utterly simple.  So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable.

Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man.  Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men, but he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man.

“I’m truly sorry to distress you”, he told his wife, “But I’m not going with you to church this Christmas eve”, he said he’d feel like a hypocrite, that he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. So, he stayed, and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another. And then another; sort of a thump or a thud. At first, he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window.  But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They had been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly, he put on a coat and goulashes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn.

He opened the doors wide and turned on a light. But the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So, he hurried back to the house, fetched breadcrumbs, sprinkled them on the snow making a trail the yellow lighted, wide-open door to the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the breadcrumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried “shooing” them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction except into the warm lighted barn.

Then he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could let them know that they can trust me.  That I’m not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led, or “shooed” because they feared him.

“If only I could be a bird”, he thought to himself “and mingle with them and speak their language.  Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm ———-
(Sudden recognition)
—- to the safe warm barn, but I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind.  He stood there listening to the bells, Adeste Fidelis. Listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.

How blessed we are to be at a school where I catch children
praising God on their dry erase boards.

So loved driving into school each day and seeing these crosses on the hill.
Very grateful to work at a Christian school!

When asked which is the greatest commandment, Jesus replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  Matt:37-39

He also said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  John 13:35

This is the time of year when we always need to revisit how to treat others. We recently discussed this poster which is posted in my classroom as another reminder.

We are watching for acts of kindness by our classmates. When we see an act of kindness, we write it on a heart and place it around the Grinch. When the Grinch learned the true meaning of Christmas, his heart grew. With Jesus in our hearts, we know that His birth is the reason we celebrate Christmas.