Christmas Angel

As my daughter Jennifer and I worked this past week to pack up the remaining stuff in our old house, we took quite a few trips to the local "green box" location to get rid of many overflowing bags of trash. During one of those trips, a small gray-haired woman walked up to us and asked, "Hi. What are you throwing away?" Except for the fact that the woman was driving a recent model car, I might have thought she was a bit eccentric if not outright daft -- who in their right mind asks about the contents of a stranger's trash bags? Granted that the contents of the trash bags were junk from around our house and not rotting fruit and chicken bones. But still the encounter seemed strangely surreal.

It turned out that this woman collects discarded but usable items and gives them to people who are poorer than herself. Within two minutes, we were fast friends. Blushing a bit at the way we were casually disposing of things I thought of as "junk," we opened our trash bags to her as well as our hearts.

After she had collected a few things she thought others might use, we invited her to the house and managed to find a number of other "junk" items for her to give away, including some that we otherwise would have kept.

It was a deeply humbling encounter, especially with Christmas on the near horizon. I told the woman that she was an angel, and meant it -- tired and slightly grumpy as I was from days of packing and cleaning -- reminding me of God's free and unbridled giving of Himself. The memory still powerfully reminds me still of the humble circumstances of God coming incarnate into the world -- His birth 2000 years ago announced to unwashed shepherds outside a small, rural town. God Himself born in a smelly stable and laid in a feed trough. Christ born again in my heart in a trash dump.

May Christ be born in you, too.