The Mid-west is just now emerging from dangerously cold weather. Actual high temperatures in our corner of the world were in double digits below zero this past week. That kind of coldness makes you scurry from warm home to heated car to whereever you thought it was important enough to venture. As your eyes tear up involuntarily, you turn from the wind and look down to the permafrost to avoid slipping. It takes a special kind of person to be looking out for the needs of others under such inclement conditions.
     C.S. Lewis wrote of Narnia dominated by evil as a land in which “it was always winter and never Christmas.” As the chill of evil falls more completely over our country and world, we can be blinded to the needs of our 7,400,000,000 neighbors. Till they have faces, till they are recognized by us as people for whom Christ Jesus bled and died to redeem, we won't live up to His call to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves. Christ reminds us that He saw our faces and pitied our need, sending His Spirit to reach over the miles and down through the years. May His light shine in your heart, lead you to see the faceless masses of the multitudes as people worthy of God's love and your most winsome witness, lovingkindness, and Christian charity!