Every year I send out a Christmas message instead of cards, as I believe time is so short that we must reach people any way we can.  Merry Christmas to all the doves!

 

                                                         The Story behind A Christmas Carol

 

          Our story begins in October of 1843 in the old city of London. The “little ice age”, which began in the mid-fourteenth century, had taken it’s toll on the rural population in Britain and northern Europe,   bringing cold, snowy winters and cool wet summers that caused crops to rot in the field. The industrial revolution was also in full swing, replacing rural cottage industries with assembly-lined factories. The population of London swelled as people moved to the city to find work. Children worked 11-16 hours a day in factories at a fraction of the adult wage. Parliament had already taken thousands of pages of oral testimony on the horrors of child labor the previous year. Charles Dickens read these testimonies and was deeply disturbed by them. He planned on writing a pamphlet appealing to the people of London on behalf of the poor.  But after some thought, he decided to incorporate his efforts into a future work of fiction. So, in October of 1843, began to write “A Christmas Carol”.

 

          In that same month, in Manchester, the young socialist, Friedrich Engels, who would later co-author “The Communist Manifesto” with Karl Marx, began writing “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. Engels’ “fix-all” for the problem of the working poor was to overthrow the existing order and replace it with a socialist state, which he and Karl Marx later promised, would culminate in a paradise on earth. History would prove them dead wrong, but not before over100 million people lay in their graves, victims of the  repressive and corrupt Marxist regimes of the 20th century. Charles Dickens had no such utopian illusions. As a master novelist, he studied people. He knew from his own observations that the problem of evil lies within the human heart. So, he created Ebenezer Scrooge as the embodiment of all the self-centered voices prevalent in his day who had no regard for the their fellow men. Scrooge would echo the sentiments of many who proposed that it is better that these destitute unfortunates should die and “decrease the surplus population”.

 

           But it is what became of Scrooge that turned the story into the best-loved tale of all time. “A Christmas Carol” is an entertaining glimpse into God’s extravagant grace that can save even the worst of us. Ebenezer Scrooge was incorrigible; he was not looking to better himself, nor was he capable of doing so. Like so many, he thought of himself as virtuous, thrifty, and hard-working. Not unlike those who have had a near-death-experience, Scrooge becomes a spectator of his own life and sees the consequences of his actions which lead to his own unlamented death and funeral. In desperation, he surrenders at the feet of the spirit of death, “holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed.” And it is– waking at sunrise, he is raised a new man. His heart of stone was gone– replaced with a heart of flesh. All had been accomplished without any effort or merit on his part; his consent was all that was needed. God has promised to do the same for us: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26) By definition, grace is never a reward for the deserving, but a gift to the undeserving. In the end, the only thing that can thwart grace is our misguided and prideful attempts to fix ourselves, when all that’s really needed is to give Him our consent to do His work in us.                                                                                                                   

Kevin John