Merry Christmas!

While running the other day, Pandora played this song in a Christmas playlist. I've heard this song dozens of times in my life but it's full impact landed this time. Listen to it and see if you can catch it before you read the rest of this post.

Yeah, it's pretty obvious…to me, anyway. It concerns making a list of all your activities good and bad. And, you are rewarded accordingly.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religious culture attributed this very behaviour to God. The goal of this teaching about God was to create the same effect that Santa's recording would create in us…FEAR!

Granted, the Santa fear was a different order of magnitude. The only thing at stake in Santa's reality was a Christmas present. In Santa's world my failure would only result in a piece of coal in my Christmas stocking. That doesn't have nearly the terrifying effect of burning in hell!Here were the key components of God's record keeping and those meticulous records impact on my soul's eternal fate.1. These records are kept by angels who never sleep and these records include even our thoughts, especially bad thoughts, like those about sex!

2. When probation (more on this concept below) closes, these records will be examined by God and my eternal destiny fixed, heaven or hell. And the "fun" part is that there is NO indication when this judgement will happen. It's basically the luck of the draw.

"Probation closing" had to do with a long and involved prophetic timeline that was adopted after the Millerites missed the date for Christ's second coming in 1844. Rather than admit their rather huge mistake, the Millerites turned the whole process into a heavenly, real-time judgement process. AND when, for some undeterminable reason, your name pops up for judgement, your eternal destiny is sealed! Your probation is closed!

If this sounds a little weird, you're wrong. It's a lot weird!

3. So, at a time you don't know, using a process that is never described, you can unknowingly be consigned to hellfire. And, by the way, once you're designated for hell, you're toast…literally.But, and this is a big one, if in that moment of judgement, you're behaving well, your judgement process will continue until you die and go to heaven OR you sin and your probation closes, sending you to hell. This is even if you passed the test the first time your name came up.Yeah, it's crazy and crazy-making. And I've just scratched the surface!

Hence, Burl Ives' "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" triggering me at Christmas…well, that's an exaggeration. But he certainly gets my attention.

Fortunately, most Christmas music is far more benign. And, I listen to it with great pleasure. To be clear, I had wonderful parents, a really good education in the SDA system but it wasn't until well into adulthood that I finally threw in the towel on the "theological" system, very briefly described above. I just couldn't live in fear any longer.

And after a rather messy extraction from this worldview, I still love good ol' Christmas music. Why is a whole other story. 

Almost 30 years ago, Garth Brooks released a Christmas song that describes my current view of the joys of Christmas. I don't want to ruin the punchline if you haven't heard the song. Suffice it to say, I can't listen to this song without choking up. It's my Christmas gift to you all!

Merry Christmas!