Christmas Cookies

      Well everyone, I am currently taking an online certificate class from a seminary, which is a certain great seminary that makes me feel very proud. I actually think I am the proudest student they have ever had.  But anyway today I got shaken up a little because we started studying the gospel of Luke, and I had to write a discussion response about what I thought about the introduction.  Well my main thought was that it made me think about Christmas. I could say something like that, but if you read the beginning of Luke, it is even more special than that and there is quite a theme of supernatural intervention all throughout the book as Jesus drives out demons and rises from the dead.  Luke also wrote Acts, which is where the Holy Spirit came to the apostles.  Well it is exciting in the same way and I think a key word is Holy.  So anyway I was trying to describe this feeling of supernatural intervention at the beginning of the book, and I said it was magical in a Christmas way.  Honestly, that does kind of capture it for me, and I have been thinking about what it is exactly that God offers instead of magic.  Because he did say to avoid sorcery and some of us find that Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragon stuff very appealing.  Well, in revelation it turns out that there was a dragon hovering over Mary when she had Jesus.  That is not a fun delivery situation.  And I have a theory that the animals in the stable helped her be okay.

     Anyway, I posted my post and then freaked out in my usual OCD way and felt that I might have imposed a certain association with magic onto the Christmas scene, when all of it involves Mary, Jesus, and the arch angel Gabriel who the Bible said stands in the very presence of God. Well you don't casually cast them into a Lord of the Rings sequel, but the point I was trying to make was that the stuff that happens in Luke and Acts actually is the stuff that beats sorcery, like it is the reason why you obey God and don't read horoscopes.  Which reminds me that the wise men found the baby Jesus by following stars, which most people do think was astrology. 

       But anyway I felt just terrible and felt like I might have hurt Mary in some way, but I think that the point of Christmas is that now you can make mistakes like that, or they might not even be mistakes anymore, and that if I said the wrong thing it is not the same thing as rummaging through Jesus Christ's cabinets and taking the devil's food cookies that Mary was hiding behind the peanut butter.