The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. I’ve been thinking about. Sort of a Christmas message these days, you Know with so much Going on so busy, life is so hectic in everyone’s lives. You know I’m at the stage of my life where my children are. My oldest is 19, 19. Yeah, 19. And then down 17, 15 and 11 going to be 12 in a in a in a week, a month or so. So and very busy, very busy like everybody. But I got friends and colleagues that their children are really young, you know, you hear Ryan Hite our communications director, his his children are, you know, down younger and and there’s a different kind of Christmas thing. And then now, friends and come Mason Mohan, our own newly he’s newlywed and his family’s just about to start, everybody’s in different spots. But you get to the spot you’re in, and it’s where you are.
And I’ve been thinking about it for Christmas because, you know, like everybody, how do you keep the focus on Christmas on what’s happening, you know, on on the truth of of the incarnation? And in this also crazy. Time with politics, right? We’re turning the calendar into 2024 and. Pretty legitimately, it feels like this one is a big, big year. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We really don’t know.
And then and then on top of that, lay over the top of that is the social media thing and and then the the the hangover from COVID where people are still sort of recovering. socially and and. Interrelated.
So how do you keep the focus on your faith and on Christmas? And it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge. One of the things this year that we did better than we’d ever done is way Ahead of time, I don’t know why, my wife and I in the summer looked at the calendar and said. How can we Plan for Christmas and get scheduled some things that will make a difference in terms of putting our minds. Into the spirit of the of the Season. Which we never do. We we never planned. It’s called planning ahead it. It may have been because of our daughter being away at college. We suddenly realize when she comes home you only have a window where you can see her. And so you better do stuff together as a Family and plan Ahead and and actually last summer we did that to make sure we had a a family vacation.
But in this case for Christmas. We looked at the calendar and we added into the calendar and went out and bought tickets. We bought tickets to the Nutcracker at the at the the Kennedy Center, which is a big production we went, we bought tickets to A Christmas Carol performed at Ford’s Theater, the the famous theater where Lincoln was assassinated had been a very vibrant theater before. That’s why the President was there. And also it went into disrepair for a couple of decades after his murder there, but then it became a a museum, but also became a theater again, and very active. And so we went. And so we did the these two events. And then within our church community, we we had a couple of different Events, one was a a Christmas drive for food for, you know, poor people and and gathering food and and the kids volunteered to be a part of that. And then. We’ve just made it A point of trying to do more with the with our church. So we kind of did it, but here’s what I want to tell you.
We kind of did it in the sense that. The the, the, we we did. The Nutcracker was Early in December. And like the first day or first second day that our daughter was home. So maybe not early. Maybe it was like the 10th or 11th of December. And then the A Christmas Carol was around the 20th or so. I can’t remember. Exactly, but both. Of them did a wonderful. Job of kind of. We had to get dressed up nice. We had dinner at Home. We didn’t go out. To dinner, but dinner at home. But we. We have dinner early at home in both cases. Well, in the case of The Nutcracker dinner early because it was a 7:00 show. In the case of the. The of the Christmas Carol, we went to a 2:00 showing and we then went and got pizza on the way Home from that but. Both of them were wonderfully done. Both were wonderfully done, and I mentioned the volunteering at our church, which the kids actually really had a good time because they had had some new. Have some new friends there. And so, and you know, the oldest, our daughter is always she’s. She’s always looking to to meet Mr. Right as a church Groups are good ones. So she was she was energized. Anyway, we we somehow did it and. And I was late to put up Christmas lights because I hate Christmas lights. That’s another story. So that that didn’t. That wasn’t the festive part.
My favorite part of the Christmas lights is a few years ago, I bought one of those cutouts, wood cutouts, and it’s a cut out of of Santa, kneeling before the baby Jesus, you know that image that you see so popularly? I love that because I love the idea of. In the Santa fervor, actually, my wife put me on to it, though, that my wife, that’s her favorite image is the is because in the fervor of Christmas it makes you you crazy to see the commercialism. And we fall Into it we have more stupid Gifts that keep coming. And my wife keeps ordering these kids have everything. Under the sun. But here we are and. In that. So I love that that’s the only lights I like. So we’re late with lights that didn’t matter.
But somehow we did it where, we were We’ve all been think we all were thinking about Christmas and about what it means.
Now over the top of that was my wife’s one of her good friends facing a serious health issue and my parents and my wife’s parents, my In-laws being in their 80s and my dad turned 80 this year, actually my mother will turn 80 next year. My in-laws are a couple of years older than that and realizing that, you know, time is finite when it comes to people like that in your life. And so somehow we kind of got this and what I want to tell you is I want to. Make an argument for. Scheduling these things that are valuable, whether it’s The Nutcracker, Christmas Carol, participating at your church, schedule them into your life as a way to beat back the frenetic quality of. You know, social media and streaming and all these things because it is frenetic, it’s wild how fast and nobody’s nobody’s immune from it. You could say. Well, I don’t use my phone veryMuch or I I monitor my Kids’ use. It’s fine. I’m not. Talking about that, I’m talking about the pace of life.
The pace of life is frenetic, and so this Christmas I keep thinking about this. Slow it down.
And the way to slow it down, counterintuitively, is schedule stuff, schedule stuff, put them in your schedule. And so that’s my pitch to you. That’s my lesson learned. And that’s my kind of encouragement.
The other thing, say the other lesson similar. Is we do this prayer call every Friday, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles prayer for America, it’s at 10:00 AM central time. And you know what? When you schedule it, prayer, it it. It’s another part for me. It’s another part of my whole week. I’m thinking of that prayer. I’m thinking who’s got prayer requests? Who can I you know? Couple days before the most recent prayer call, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. She’s an extraordinary woman, and she’s starting a university to teach science. She’s a scientist to teach science and and to teach it from an explicitly Christian tradition. Not and not separated and not secularized and not driven. And anyway, extraordinary lady, she’s waiting on accreditation. And she’s been thinking about it and she said to me, will you pray? Will you pray for it? And I said, yeah, you bet. And I’ve been thinking about it so and because I had the prayer call scheduled, it says every week 10:00 central time. I thought that’s coming and I can. Put I can put that into my life as a focus and it works. It works really well, so feel free to join us, by the way. Put that if you wanna put that into your schedule. I’m we. I’m scheduling it for you, we run it out of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles programs and you can easily come in there. You know, every every Friday or every other Friday or every 5th Friday. We’re there every Friday at 10:00 AM central time and just e-mail me or Ryan or Mason and we’ll get you the information so you can join in. So that’s my point.
Now you ready for the blow you away Insight that I came away with On this?
The reason, the reality, that’s better, of God sending his Son to become man in the incarnation, this miracle that’s at the heart of Christ’s birth. It’s not just that a really great baby was born and a really great baby was born and had a really great life and gave us a lot of great teachings. That’s not what happened.
What happened was God. God sent his son became man the incarnation. God as man. He he came down to be like us, exactly like us. Except he’s also God. And that’s a mystery, right? That’s a mystery that’s often a challenge for people to figure out to contemplate.
But here’s the key. It didn’t happen in a book. It didn’t happen in a theory. It didn’t happen in a movie, made for TV movie. It wasn’t a tweet or an X post. It wasn’t a a sub stack.
It was in time, in time in history, in the history of us. Today is one day, tomorrow’s another day. I’m in time. I’m in history.
What happened was one day there was not God as man and the next Day there was. It happened in time. There was a man who was God, who lived for 30 plus years and walked the earth in time, just like us, which makes our time so special. What makes our time not just. You know something we have to get through to get to heaven or to get to our fulfillment. However you want to understand what unity with Christ will be in heaven or you know in in salvation, it’s we are granted. We are in time precisely as an echo of the incarnation of God becoming man, which is why scheduling things. For me to to do these events that point us, you know, this church volunteer thing I mentioned that was so wonderful. Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker. I didn’t think I’d like The Nutcracker, by the way. The first act was pretty terrible. I thought too busy and crazy. The second act was all these extraordinary gifted dancing moves. I didn’t think I’d ever like it. It was wonderful. It was amazing and very spiritual is the wrong word. It’s very soulful. Amazing. So.
Schedule it and when you think about the holiness of the day of the holidays, the Holy Days, think about what a gift they are in time because not because of God’s goodness to us. That’s true, but because he sent his Son to be among us. The word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Not was around other people, was thoughtful and among us. That’s my message. for this Christmas season, be right back.
