Late Christmas Eve.

I want to tell you the neighborhood is quiet, but it’s not.  The wind is blowing in from the south.  It’s not a gentle breeze either.

Even inside the house with the windows closed, I hear it howl.  On Christmas Eve, the wind shouts through the oaks that line the neighborhood road.  A single step outside the front door reminds me of the temperature.

Nearly sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, says the outside thermometer, even as the mechanism in the old mantle clock readies the energy to strike twelve times on the spring that passes for a chime in the ancient timepiece.  I hear it striking faintly as I wander away from the house.  There will be no white Christmas here.

Bells.  I do hear bells out here.  Wind chimes on my house, front and back.  I check the ones in the front where I am and they are swinging energetically.  The D6th chord the circular pipes make as the clapper makes its rounds is reassuring. 

All is well.

Still, I’m not sure. 

So, I wander down the street a few feet.  There are more bells at a neighbor’s house, and I stop to listen for a minute.  When I was in their yard earlier this week, I admired them and found that they have square pipes, not round as mine are. 

No matter.  They make as beautiful a chord as the one I just left at my place, a G7th, if my ear is to be trusted.  But, amongst the dong, dong, dong of the square chimes, I hear a periodic clunk.

I don’t have to trespass in the neighbor’s yard to find the cause.  It’s pretty clear that the whole affair, buffeted by the gusting wind, is hitting the porch’s wooden support beam once in a while as it repeats the beautiful chord.

I laugh.  I know the feeling.  For the last three or four weeks, my life has been wrapped up in playing Christmas music on my horn at various events with other instrumentalists.  I just played earlier this evening with a wonderful collection of humans at our church’s Christmas Eve service.

I do.  I play some beautiful notes.  I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that. But then, the wind (or something else) goes through the horn wrong and a clunker comes out the bell.  Some nights, a lot more of them than can be explained away by bad vision, or sticky valves, or even not getting enough sleep last night.

There are some reading this who understand what I mean.  Come to think about it, it may be most of you who understand it, even if you don’t play a musical instrument. 

Clunkers happen.  All our life, they happen.

I used to wonder if God kept track of all my clunkers. In life, I mean; not my horn playing. Even today, in my dark moments, I still do.

He has a lot of those to tally.  For me, anyway.

But suddenly, I remember what night it is.  And yes, I’m perfectly aware that December the twenty-fifth is almost certainly not the day our Savior came to us as a baby in a smelly stable.  But, it is the day we commemorate the event.  In the season we consider the great love our Creator God showed for every human in the world by sending His Son.

And, the realization stops me where I stand, listening to the beautiful, tuned chimes as they whirl and gyrate in the unbridled wind.

God Incarnate, Emmanuel, our God With Us, came to earth and was born a baby, not because of our beauty and attractiveness.

He came because He loved us and wanted us to be with Him.

Period. 

Or, if you prefer the term our British cousins use—Full Stop.

It is worth a moment or two of consideration.  Perhaps, even an hour or—and, I know this is extreme—a lifetime.  It might just take that long to take it in.

Clunkers and all, His grace reached down into our midst and gave us—Himself.

Love and Light come down to dwell with us.  To die for us.  To give us life.

With Him.

Even when things don’t go as we planned.  When we fall on our face.  When we stand in front of the crowd and let fly a clunker to beat all clunkers.

He wants us to be with Him.  Forever.

So, let the wild bells chime!  Let the trumpets blast!  Let the loud voices rise!

A Child is born.

Clunkers will be remembered no more.

Beautiful music to my ears.

To His, too.

 

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.
(from the poem Ring Out Wild Bells, by Alfred Lord Tennyson)

God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
(1 John 4:9-10, NLT)