The picture on my homepage isn’t AI. I don’t like AI – one bit. My daughter went out one day after a particularly heavy rain spell and took a bunch of pictures of the aftermath and that one caught my eye. The colors seemed perfect, at least to me, and as she always asks me what I want for Christmas and I can never think of anything – seems like it’s a thing to try and explain I don’t want anything that costs any money, but one always needs to consider other folks’ desire to give something, so I asked her if she’d get that picture blown up and mounted in a lighted frame so I could hang it in my old farmhouse, and lo and behold she did, it turned out really nice. My brother came over and commented on how much he likes the pic and ordered one just like it for his house, so I guess it’s pretty to others besides myself. The notion of giving gifts on Christmas has been – and is still being – debated as to whether or not it’s appropriate within the bounds of the New Covenant of Christ. Some point to the passages in the story of Jesus’ birth when the magi came bearing gifts for the newborn Savior as the origin of Christmas giving, and that’s plenty good enough for me as far as being an example of why folks like to give gifts in remembrance of that event, but on the other hand, Christmas has inarguably gotten out of hand in the context of commercialization with rich folks making money off people’s desire to give.

That landscape picture my daughter ordered up for me, and later for my brother, probably didn’t cost much in our valuation of money, so not a lot of cash changed hands, but a great deal of satisfaction was derived both from the giver and the recipient(s). I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty sure that’s the reason, the spirit, if you will, of Christmas giving. There should be love on both ends of the transaction if the gift is to comport with the substance of the act, it has to be loving thy neighbor in it’s purest form. That said, I must go back to what I mentioned about the cost, because even though 30 bucks (or whatever it cost) might not seem like much to folks in our society, it is a fortune to people in some places and that’s a sad statement of the condition of our world. Even though here in our neck of the woods in the Ozarks, most of us don’t have a lot of money, even we lowly hillbillies live like royalty compared to a lot of places in the world. There are even places in this nation of abundance where many people don’t even have a roof over their head. In some of our biggest cities where rivers of wealth flow through skyscrapers, people down on the streets live in tents – the lucky ones have tents, others sleep on cardboard or in dumpsters.

In countries like India, Pakistan, and many Asian countries, people live in great slums, they don’t know of any other lifestyle. Children are raised sifting through garbage trying to find a little food. In the Philippines, night people prowl through the garbage bins for leftover scraps from fast food cafes. In some places there, they recook fried chicken scraps to make what they call pag pag, a cuisine of the truly destitute, but accepted as a source of sustenance by those who have nothing else. Whole families can be found in the refuse dumps at night prowling through garbage for some small bits of food. Alongside most of these slums, across the tracks or whatever divides the universes of wealth and poverty, shiny skyscrapers stand brimming with champaign-guzzling rich people who haven’t spent one day of their lives worrying about the price of a bill of groceries. They’ve never experienced the struggle to pay an electric bill or had to endure a fight through some easily cured illness because they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor. Way too many people in our world have to leave this life entirely because of the exorbitant cost of medical care. Rich people have no concept of the spirit of Christmas, nor will they ever.

Famine and disease have become a way of life in way too many places in the world. There are way too many stories out there, way too many pictures of little emaciated African children with bellies swollen from starvation, so many flies on their tiny faces they have long stopped trying to swat them away. I’m not trying to say there is any easy solution to these woes of humanity, but how many people are even trying to help? There are some cash-strapped organizations, totally dependent on the generosity of Godly donors and organizations out there trying to help, but as always, the attention of the majority of the world that might otherwise be made aware and able to help is drawn to things and events of lesser importance – international soccer matches, unnecessary wars, stupid undertakings like the “Line” in Saudi Arabia, etc. How many starving kids in the world could have been fed for the price of that farce? Or the price of an aircraft carrier? How many homeless people here in the US could be put in affordable housing for the wasted treasure expended on these damnable temples to demons they call data centers?

The US allocates over a trillion dollars a year on “defense”, i.e. the greatest scam of human history in which the stockholders of organizations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, McDonell Douglas etc. have grown unfathomable rich in the business of promulgating humans murdering each other. Wars are started precisely to enrich these soulless entities in which countless innocent people are murdered every day somewhere in the world. The US has privatized institutions like prisons so as to further enrich more of the already wealthy as more and more activities of the public are criminalized so as to increase the number of incarcerated. Wealthy men can rape and traffic minor children and get completely away with it – indeed, become president – but poor men go to these private prisons for stealing food.

The real war going on in our world is not between immigrants and residents. It is not between blacks and whites. It’s not even between communists and capitalists. The real war, as everyone will someday understand, is between the rich and the not rich of the world and it always has been. But that’s just on this side of the great divide. This life. Satan has armed his servants with the wealth of the world and between those who have the wealth and those who desire to have it, Satan has near complete control. Men who desire wealth do not need to actually have it in order for Satan to capture them, the desire for it is plenty enough to get his work done. Things will be far different on the other side, for over there Satan doesn’t have any say in what goes on.

There’s just so much actual evil happening in the world right now that it should be obvious to even the folks who have made it their life’s mission to preach against giving gifts on Christmas that there are more important things to worry about than celebrating what a lot of folks think of as Jesus’ birthday.

A lot of the thoughts in this article go through my head when I look at that beautiful picture my daughter gifted me for Christmas. It’s a complicated world, but Jesus has a great way of simplifying it. The only way to emerge from this existence victorious is to get right with Jesus Christ and if you haven’t done so, I implore you to – today, we don’t have much time left here, and the rich folks are going to crash and burn along with their master, so don’t look to them for help, they have no desire to see you on the winning side of this great battle.

May the blessings of the Almighty Father find and keep us.

MK