A Chilling Christmas

First off, thank you to everyone who downloaded a free copy of my book, The Man in the Box, yesterday! We gave away 600 e-books in the last three days! If you missed out on the free e-book give away, you can still get it here and help us reach our goal of 1600 by 2013! Please… keep spreading the word about it, and if you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts and post a short review on Amazon.

Sarabeth and I are reading A Christmas Carol together. This is the fourth consecutive year we’ve tried to do this, but this time I think we’re actually going to make it, now that we’ve made communal reading a regular habit throughout 2012! I’ve read it several times and I’ve got to say, it’s still one of the best books that has ever been written.

While A Christmas Carol focusses on the kind and charitable acts we can bestow upon each other, it, in some ways points us to the little scene in Bethlehem where God sent His most precious gift to us to save the lost and one day redeem the earth.

A perfect time for us to ponder over the good we’ve done for others (or lack thereof).

Not that our good deeds earn our ticket to Heaven or make God want to hug flowers and frolic through fields of lilac. But they still might mean the world to those “fellow travelers to the grave.”

Ponder this eerie passage from A Christmas Carol which haunts me even through spring and summer, and has kept me up some nights.

(Scrooge has just been visited by Marley’s Ghost – not the dog. He has been warned that he will be visited by three spirits in hopes that he might change his ways. Marley flees the room through Scrooge’s window and he follows. He looked out…)

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever. 

Think about it. We, right now, as living, breathing people, are not as powerless as we think. And one of those powers that each of us has been bestowed with is the power to help others.

Please share your thoughts of this haunting passage in the comments below. How does it make you feel like Christmas? Does it inspire you or scare you? How so? And, please share with us your favorite movie version of A Christmas Carol (we’ve all got one!).

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