(Written for the Greenville Free Methodist Church’s December newsletter)
If you know me at all, you know that music is a very important aspect of my life. I love to hear something musically that grabs my attention, but most of the time, my initial reaction of liking a song is confirmed only when the lyrics grab me and that combination of powerful music and meaningful lyrics combine to form a piece that gets into my soul.
This phenomenon is especially true with Christmas music. I love Christmas music and listen to it every possible minute during the holiday season. My iPod boasts over 30 Christmas albums for a total of more than 375 songs. According to iTunes, it would take me 21.4 hours to listen to my holiday playlist all the way through. And that doesn’t count the tapes and records at home that I don’t have digitized.
In all of this music, I hear different versions of the same song over and over and I love those songs, but the ones that stand out to me are the ones that are different, original, and really capture an aspect of Christmas that I hadn’t thought of in that way before.
Recently, as I was listening to the latest addition to my Christmas music collection, I found yet another one of those songs. It is sung by Faith Hill and is called, “A Baby Changes Everything.” The song tells about an unmarried teenage girl and how her life is changed by a baby. It goes on to talk of shepherds who gather around and angels who sing of this baby who has changed everything. The music is great, the lyrics fantastic, but it was the last verse of the song that gave me pause: “My whole life has turned around, I was lost but now I’m found. A baby changes everything. A baby changes everything.” I was speechless, breathless, with the gravity of that truth. A baby changed everything. The birth of Christ brought God to us in a way that wasn’t possible before. The birth of Christ made possible for us a relationship with God that we couldn’t have had before. The birth of Christ and my belief in and love for Him changes me in ways that wouldn’t be possible any other way.
Have we allowed this baby to really change us? As we walk through this season of Advent, perhaps we need to pray about and open ourselves up to the work of the Lord and really allow His spirit to penetrate our hearts and change us. Pastor Doug has been talking to us throughout the fall about harnessing the power to change. How will you harness that power and allow the birth of a baby to change everything for you?