A Gift From The Heart

A Gift From the Heart

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Luke 1:26-28, NIV

The illustrations offered on PreachingToday.com include the following story of one couple’s gift of encouragement at Christmastime:

Every December since 1992, Morrill Worcester, owner of one of the world’s largest holiday wreath companies, has taken time in the midst of his busiest season to haul a truckload of wreaths to the Arlington National Cemetery. Morrill and his band of volunteers spend a day laying wreaths on the graves of over 5,000 soldiers as part of the Wreaths Across America program.

Worcester, 56, started the program when one of his warehouses called to report an overproduction of several thousand wreaths. He said: “Well, I’m not just gonna throw them away. That’s when I thought of Arlington.” He called Washington and asked for permission to lay his wreaths. To his surprise, he got it.

“When people hear about what we’re doing, they want to know if I’m a veteran,” Morrill said on the Wreaths Across America website. “I’m not. But I make it my business never to forget.” His wife, Karen, agrees: “We want to honor the veterans, and we do it with the products we make ourselves. We’re like the Little Drummer Boy. He had his drum; we have our wreaths.”

For Morrill and Karen, the program is a way to give back. Christmas wreaths had made them rich. Through Wreaths Across America, they feel they are reclaiming the true meaning of a wreath, showing it as something more than a glitzy holiday ornament: “We wanted to get back to the simple idea of what a wreath represents—respect, honor, and victory.”^a

Morrill and Karen remind us all that Christmas is not about what we find under the tree. It’s about giving back. Christmas, as someone has said, is when God came down the stairs of heaven with a baby in his arms. That gift of love is what the wonder of Christmas is all about. And that’s the gift we can give, as a couple, in some meaningful way to our own community. It may not be as dramatic as five thousand wreaths. But a gift of love from the heart can be even more meaningful.

Probably the reason we all go so haywire at Christmas time with the endless unrestrained and often silly buying of gifts is that we don’t quite know how to put our love into words.

—Harlan Miller

^a 186