How Silently the Gift is Given

The sky was clear, crisp and studded with stars as I walked across the campus of St. Olaf College toward my dormitory. It was early December in Minnesota, back in the day when winter was really winter and a walk across campus after midnight could be sheer agony. Breath clung as hoar frost on my free range 1970s collegiate beard. I was sure the water in my eyes was turning to ice.

Something else hovered in the air with the cold. This was the weekend of the annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival. I had worked the late shift in my work-study position as night security supervisor for the student union. I had spent hours on my feet making sure everything was okay for the Norwegian food buffet, pointing alums and visitors toward the beloved concert, helping folks find restrooms and coatracks and wandering family members, making my way each hour through the bustling hoards of excited folk to make sure the right doors were open and the others ones closed. Finally, well after midnight, after the last of the yuletide revelers had left, I made my final rounds, turned off the lights, locked up the big, now silent building, and made my way across the wind-swept campus toward bed.

I caught myself humming “Beautiful Savior” as I walked. Although I had not been at the concert that weekend, I knew this hymn had been sung by candlelight as the closing piece, as it had since, well, since forever. My shivering body begged me to hurry through the cold toward the top berth of our triple-bunked dorm room. My spirit implored me to slow down, look around, and take in the luminous winter world crafted by the beautiful Savior of whom I sang like an echo of the concert ended hours ago.

Neither of my roommates was in our room when I arrived. The glimmering lights of our little desk-borne Christmas tree drew me in. I sat at my desk, thawing hands nestled in my coat pockets, basking in the graceful light shining softly in the dark room.

In the shadows under the tree I noticed a small wrapped package bearing my name. It had not been there when I left earlier in the day. I picked it up and noticed an electrical cord running from it like a long, slithery tail to the wall outlet. What gadget did my roomies give me for Christmas? I tore off the paper to discover that it was…my alarm clock, the one that roused me from sleep every day. They wrapped my alarm clock?!

Now I saw another wrapped gift pulling low a branch of the tree by a duct-taped hook. Round and heavy…unhooked and unwrapped it was a prized baseball from my high school career. Then, on my pillow a long, thin, carefully wrapped pretzel stick from the big plastic jar of them I brought and shared from home.

My eyes thawed and I wept at the goofy love of my roommates. I took a deep breath of the room’s warm air and whispered a prayer of wonder and thanks, blinking at the soft light glistening in the prism of my tears.

Isn’t this what the manger-borne Jesus reveals for us, the giftedness of our every day? Doesn’t God in Christ carefully wrap with goodness and love the very things and people we take for granted day by day and give them back to us glistening with grace? Isn’t it so that this Jesus, this Emmanuel, makes holy what we think is merely mundane?

Yes. Yes. Yes. It is so. How silently the wondrous gift is given!