In recent years I have addressed a letter to family and friends at Christmas time. I am attaching this year’s letter.

God bless you all.

Dear Family and Friends,

It’s a busy time of the year, and I don’t know how many of you will take a few minutes to read this, but I want you to know that I love you and am honored to be a member of my beautiful extended family or to know you as a friend.

Another Christmas, another letter.

Christmas memories fill my mind during this holy season.  Some ninety years ago, as a very young boy, I accompanied my big brother Harold as we searched the nearby woods for a shapely Christmas Tree.  I admired and loved him so very much. As of last Good Friday, he’s been in heaven twenty years, and I still miss him, but we’ll be together again soon.  So it is with my beloved father, mother and other brothers and sisters, and so it is with my dear wife Ann. They all loved the Lord, and they kept his commandments. 

Of course, neither my parents, wife nor siblings were perfect.  Neither am I.   But they came very close.  The Lord Jesus mends our every flaw.

I was fortunate to have been born as the only child of Saunders and Annie Belle Jordan.  They had both lost their first spouses.  When I arrived, my father was 56.  My mother was 38.  I had seven half-brothers and sisters, and they never treated me as anything but whole.

I remember that every night my dear mother would kneel beside her bed and pray for her children and grandchildren.

As I reflect on it, I believe our family history reflects the First Commandment’s promise.  The Lord God said that he would “visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the third or fourth generation of those who hate me, but I will show mercy and steadfast love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Sober and comforting thoughts, indeed.  Take them to heart. 

I’ve had a happy life in the bosom of a wonderful, caring family and among others whom I have had the privilege of knowing and loving.  I praise God for these blessings.

Love God! Love one another!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!