The Gospel According to St. Luke

I heard the Christmas story afresh yesterday and I was grateful.

It was our last day of classes so we had a brunch for the first class and a lunch for the second class.  I put a few activities on the whiteboard asking them to estimate the distance from South Bend to the North Pole, to do a Christmas calculator activity and word search, and to find the Christmas story in the Bible.  I found several Bibles of various sorts on the shelf upstairs where Granger Community Church stores books.

In the first class, I think E was the only one who could find the story in Luke 2.  When he told us the story was in Luke, several were able to find it in the table of contents of their Bibles.  Many had no idea of where to start.  When someone opens the Bible and reads Psalms, pronouncing both the "p" and the "s" and then reads Job with a short vowel, you know that Bibles are not familiar books to him or her.  I asked E to read us the story and he did so slowly and beautifully with his Kenyan accent.  We were all perfectly quiet, following along in our own Bibles.  I felt as if I were hearing it for the first time as possibly some of the students were doing so.   We also found the story of the wise men in Matthew and then others read that aloud.

The second class had a couple of students who knew the story was found in Luke.  There were others who expressed surprise that there was a Christmas story in the Bible.  Were they thinking the Christmas story was about Santa or Rudolf?  I don't know.

B had called in the morning and said she wanted to come back.  She said she had gotten into trouble which I knew.   I said it was our last day and we would meet again in January.  Later I called her and invited her to come today to eat and work.  I was thinking that she would be able to hear the Christmas story too.

In typical fashion, students in the first class brought food to share--soda, donuts, a chicken dish, an egg dish.  We had a feast!  Students in the afternoon class brought nothing but did enjoy the food immensely!  One woman called her mother to tell her about the spread--saying it was "fire!"