How the Real Meaning changes

I grew up in the 50's (yikes!) and was taught some very basic principles at church:

1. We were the only ones going to Heaven. Check that: We were the only ones with the hope of Heaven. Check that: We hoped that we had time to say a prayer of forgiveness just before we died so that we could hope to go to Heaven.

2. When you pray you said, "In Jesus Name" otherwise God would not think the message was for him. Check that: God would know that it was a Christian calling.

3. We could not prove in the Bible that Jesus was born in December so why make a Big Deal out of his birth once a year, when we can do it for three minutes once a week. After all December had yet to be invented and the Shepherds were tending sheep in the hills. If it had been December they would have had them in the barns because of the long snowy Palestine winters.

Armed with that information, I started school.

We said the Lord's Prayer at the start of the day, but I doubted that it cleared our classroom ceiling because we didn't end the prayer correctly. When we went to football games, my parents would grip on the way home because the person that led the pre-game prayer wasn't our kind of Christian. Leaving me to realize that God didn't help us win that night.

When Christmas came around, we did not sing Christmas Carols at our church. We were stronger than that. Those songs were in our hymnal and every once and a while (in June), the song leader would lead us in "Silent Night" just to make a point. The preacher on the Sunday closest to Christmas would lambast the visitors for coming to church only twice a year (They got it again at Easter!). He would say, "Don't you know that we should celebrate Jesus' birth all the time and not just once a year?" It made me wonder though, why people were only in a good mood at church about once a year and not every Sunday.

So here it is 50 years later (yikes). The same group of people wants "Prayer in School" and wants everyone to remember "The Reason for the Season"! Our worship leader will talk about the "Real meaning of Christmas" and sing Christmas Songs! We will even have a giant Christmas tree in the Building! When I was in high school our preacher, refused to have a tree in his home. He would not allow his kids to have gifts or anything! I'm glad someone changed the Bible. (Remember the thing about the King James Version was that it was just King James's version.)

It is a wonder that I made it through all this. The sad part is that most of my peers that grew up with me, could not run the maze and now goes the church "Twice a year".