That Perfect Gift

I just got back from buying unsliced french bread and bandages at the grocery store (no, the purchases weren't related). To be more truthful, I just escaped mayhem at our shopping center, dodging between preoccupied, frustrated people in the last hours of Christmas eve. Craziness! Soon...we'll be past the advertisements that urge us to keep buying. Earlier today when I logged on to my computer, the "home page" of my internet server boasted, "It's not too late to find the perfect gift." I had no interest in going to the link, but the phrase was pregnant with meaning (and that's pun intended).

After reading the internet's teaser headline, I thought of another "perfect gift" that someone opened before it was too late. I write of it in my devotional, Heaven,The Greatest Home Makeover. In our small town daily newspaper, survivors can buy space for detailed obituaries about someone who died. Some spend lots of money listing memberships, honors, and survivors, right down to their favorite dog. But one day I read a special one in which the family shared its admiration for the deceased person's amazing, self-taught mechanical how-to. Then they added (and for me, this was the best part!) that two weeks before his death (from diabetes complications, as I recall), he "received Christ as his Lord and Savior and was baptized along with his son. God had been patient, waiting all these years for the Spirit to move in his heart, time and again returning him from death's door."

We won't always have chance after chance after chance to receive God's gift of eternal life through Jesus. I think about that a lot when the holidays come and, for one thing, traffic fatalities related to drinking rise. (For those who don't know, my family was almost killed by a drinking driver in 1997.)

If you're reading this and haven't yet received God's gift, why wait? If you've been praying for years for a loved one to make that decision, don't quit. George Mueller prayed for decadesfor two of his friends to come to Christ. By the time he was buried, both made that life-changing decision.

The internet headline, despite its materialistic intentions, is spiritually right. It's not too late to find the just-right gift. It's been waiting for you all along. The perfect gift is a Person, not a package: "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift" (2 Cor. 9:15).

P.S. The photo is of decorations on our Christmas tree. Next to the cross is a note telling of our treasured gift this year: a donation on our behalf to an organization that helps the poor and hungry.