These days are very cold here. My small
space beside the window is without glass making most nights unbearable to
sleep. The treatment by fellow prisoners is also quite cold and at times
hostile. Some of my fellow prisoners don’t like me because I am a convert and a
pastor. They look at me with shame as someone who has betrayed his former
religion. The guards can’t even stand the paper cross that I have made and hung
next to me as a sign of my faith and in anticipation of celebrating my Savior’s
birth. They have threatened me and forced me to remove it. This is the first
Christmas that I am completely without my family; all of my family is presently
outside of the country. These conditions have made this upcoming Christmas
season very hard, cold and shattering for me. It appears that I am alone with
no one left beside me.
Christmas means that God came so that
He would enter your hearts today and transform your lives and to replace your
pain with indescribable joy. . . .
The same way that the heat from the
earth’s core melts the hard stones in itself and produces lava, the fiery love
of God, Jesus Christ, through the virgin Mary’s womb came to earth on Christmas
to melt the hard heart of sin and wickedness of the world and removes them from
our life.
So this Christmas let the lava-like
love of Christ enter into the depth of your heart and make you fiery, ready to
pay any cost in order to bring the same lava love to the cold world around you,
transforming them with the true message of Christmas.
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These words come from American citizen and Pastor Saeed Abedini, imprisoned in Iran for his faith. And we Christians in the U.S. can think we have it tough...
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