Saturday, December 19, 2009

Feliz Navidad

Classes have been winding down here at Acorn, and our numbers have dwindled a bit. We've been keeping attendance stats for 3 years now and there doesn't seem to be any pattern related to weather or time of year. In any case, we are taking a 2 week break from English, computer and Spanish classes, resuming the first week of January. I was encouraged that even on Thursday, our last day of class for 2009, we had 4 first-time students show up.

As I mentioned in my last post, a couple of my Acorn friends have been going through deep waters, and so these past weeks have been filled with sadness. And yet in this Advent season, I want to rejoice with the angels who brought "good news of great joy that will be for all the people". The recent issue of Christianity Today had a wonderful editorial called The Joy-Driven Life that I highly recommend you read. Here's a quote from it, that was actually a quote from G.K. Chesterton: "A person is fully human when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial...Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live."

As we celebrate the scandalous visitation of God in the flesh, may we all know great joy!