Dear Jesus,
We commonly communicate, but communication reaches a new level in sacredly celebrating your birthday -- Christmas Day. Times passes swiftly. But it comes to a halt on Christmas. We pay homage and gratitude to you for your wisdom and sacrifice that we strive in vain to imitate.
Your Sermon on the Mount is our light to happiness and goodness.
As 2025 uncurtains, we need your inspiration more than ever. The world is in turmoil. An epidemic of conflict and natural disasters. Children everywhere are ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-fed. In some places, infants have death certificates before birth certificates.
Teach us to turn swords into plowshares and make war no more.
Teach us to honor and bless the peacemakers more than the armored knights.
Teach us to love our neighbors more than ourselves -- to make perfect selflessness our most cherished aspiration.
We know your Second Coming will be deferred until we align ourselves with pure Christian charity.
We mourn the loss of ethics in our culture. We mourn diminishing benevolence and every gracious instinct of the human heart.
While I harbor high hopes for the incoming administration, President-elect Donald Trump is no savior. He is mortal and made of the same crooked timber as other men. You are our deliverance by appealing to the better angels of our nature to practice virtue and oppose vice. But we hope for the best with Trump.
We recognize that our fate is in your hands. We surrender and bow to your godliness. You erase distinctions between Vice President Kamala Harris supporters and Trump supporters. We are all minnows in the eyes of the Lord.
On Christmas Day, I recognize that you are the beginning, middle and end of my life, for which I am eternally grateful. Without your guidance and prayers, I can accomplish nothing.
The storms may come; the winds may blow; the rains may enter; the snow may fall. But my confidence and devotion to you remain as constant and irresolute as the Rock of Gibraltar.
I summon all my reverence and awe of you as a tribute to your bright divinity.
Your servant,
Armstrong Williams