Merry Christmas from the Parsonage Family.

What a privilege it is to serve Christ, inHis Church, here in Kilgore , TX.

We love and appreciate each of you. 

What a blessing and gift you are to us,

and to so many others.

Merry Christmas

The Lord comforts us, not to make us comfortable, but to make us comforters.

-John Henry Jowett

One of the most charming Christian legends is associated with this troubling time in Mary and Joseph and Jesus’ young life.

When Joseph and Mary and Jesus were on their way to Egypt, the story runs, as the evening came they were weary, and they sought refuge in a cave.  It was very cold, so cold that the ground was white with hoar frost.  A little spider saw the little baby Jesus, and he wished so much that he could do something for Him to keep Him warm in the cold night.  He decided to do the only thing he could do, to spin his web across the entrance of the cave, to make as it were, a curtain there.  Along the path there came a detachment of Herod’s soldiers, seeking for children to kill to carry out Herod’s bloodthirsty order.  When they came to the cave thy were about to burst in to search it, so see if anyone was hiding there, but their captain noticed the spider’s web.  It was covered with the white hoar frost and stretched right across the entrance to the cave.  “Look,” he said, “at the spider’s web there.  It is quite unbroken and there cannot possibly be anyone in the cave, for anyone entering the cave would certainly have torn the web.”  So the soldiers passed on, and left the holy family in peace, because o little spider had spun his web across the entrance to the cave.  And that, so they say, is why to this day we put tinsel on our Christmas trees, for the glittering tinsel streamers stand for the spider’s web, white with the hoar frost, stretched across the entrance of the cave on the way to Egypt.

The moral of the story is this:  In our trouble, God will some how, some way, through some one, take care of us.

Take some tinsel and place it in your Bible.  May it be a constant reminder this sacred season, that in your trouble you will find God’s Presence, God’s Provision, ultimately God’s Power.

The legend is take from:  William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, “Gospel of Matthew” vol. 1 (Edinburgh:  The Saint Andrew’s Press,  1963), 26.