The other night I went to the Sunday school annual Christmas concert. It was just like a million other Sunday school Christmas concerts put on by the kiddies of a million other churches around the world… a wonderful, warm, human, amusing, delightful affair produced by a lot of very patient Sunday school teachers and featuring a lot of little knee-high to a grasshopper actors and actresses.
It's a funny thing, but I always come away from a Sunday school concert with a great feeling of contentment inside me. I think it stems from far-reaching thoughts about my own childhood. I can think back to the concerts I was in… and you know… the concert the other night could have taken place last year… 10 years ago… 20… 30… 40 years ago, with nothing changed but the building… a purely physical thing. The shining faces… the forgotten lines… the shy blasters… the deep sincerity… the warmth of little children's voices… the purity… the simple reverence… these things are constant. I think that's what affects me about Christmas concerts. In this mad, frantic, hectic, dog-eat-dog progressive world, here is something unchanged, and unchangeable. A child's enactment of the birth of Christ. If a man needs a lifeline to hold fast to when he thinks all else is lost… send him to a children's Sunday school Christmas concert. There he will find something that is honest to God in the truest sense of the word. "And a little child shall lead them.”
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