What
we celebrate at Christmas is about many things, and one of those things is
grace, that outpouring of God’s love where it is often most undeserved – us.
The
stories in Finding
Christmas: Stories of Startling Joy and Perfect Peace by James Calvin
Schaap are about that – underserved grace, grace falling on the undeserving,
the people dealing with the brokenness in their lives and in the lives of those
they love.
Finding Christmas is comprised of
seven stories, each with both a title and a subtitle. In “The Baby / Forgetting
Jesus,” an eighth grader playing Mary in a Sunday school Christmas play has to
find a doll to play the Baby Jesus. In “The
Party: Facts of Life,” a grandmother hungers to touch the granddaughter she’s
not allowed to talk with. In “The Gifts / She’ll Love It,” a mother wrestles
with believing she may have loved one daughter too much and the second a
teenager pregnant and wanting to keep the baby.
“The
Church / Finding Something,” a mother despairs of her professionally successful
daughter who’s lost all interest in the church of her youth. “The Pageant /
First Cry in the Stable” has a child learning a lesson about animals and living
on a farm. In “The Afterglow / Merry Madness,” a worker in a home for abandoned
children discovers grace on New Year’s Eve. And in “the Snowfall / Joy and
Miracle,” a man discovers that Jesus came for all of the needy, including the
educated, sophisticated elitists like himself.
 |
| James Schaap |
James
Schaap in an emeritus professor of literature and writing at Dordt College in
Sioux City, Iowa. He’s a novelist and short story writer, and has also written
several devotional books. His most recent book is Reading Mother Teresa: A Calvinist looks lovingly at
“the little bride of Christ.” He blogs at Stuff in the Basement.
These
stories of everyday, recognizable people – children, cafeteria workers, an actor,
a pregnant teenager, mothers and grandmothers – are exactly what Christmas is
about.
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