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Jesus was cool.

Let’s get that out of the way, because the man was really cool. He helped people, he came from a loving, yet impossibly hard background where his mom had to endure a lot of things to even get him born into this world. Heck, he was born in a barn after escaping a lot of political prejudices because no one could put a woman in labor up for the night. Caesar Augustus created a situation where Jesus’ parents had to leave their home in Nazareth so he could just be born. Angels even showed up to tell shepherds that something monumental was happening in Bethlehem.

And even when he was a kid, King Herod try to exterminate him by killing a bunch of boy babies under the age of two so Mary and Joseph were on the run with their son. They were basically fugitives. Needless, to say, those were some hard times. Basically, people were just trying to survive. There were no Nanos, no Internet, no TV and no random entertainment. There was work, survival and trying to make it to another day. If you were hungry you were going to have to take care of it yourself because McDonalds wasn’t an option back in the day.

Throughout his life, Jesus was nice. He helped people that no one else would help. He didn’t ask much in return other than a few minutes to explain about his dad and that in this world, we needed to treat each other kindly and said “I came that they may have life” and he worked on that from what we read in the scriptures. Everybody deserved a shot is the way that I understand it.

And he was willing to die for a message of peace. They don’t call him the King of Peace for nothing. He cried when he returned to Jerusalem. That’s always stuck with me.

Like I said, those times were pretty rough.

I have often wondered, and I have nothing to back this up, if people back in the time of Jesus thought there was some supernatural things going on. I grew up in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and we always would pray to the father, the son and the Holy Ghost. In any religion, it is about faith of what we cannot visibly see, but what we can feel.

I’ve never seen Jesus, but I’m asked to believe in him. Faith is an odd thing, trying to grasp onto something that can’t be seen although when I was a kid, my mother said you could feel him talking to you if you tried hard enough. She also said that we aren’t going to always get the answers we want.

Now, it’s Christmas two millenniums later. We use a lot of catch phrases when it comes to faith and religion, but the message hasn’t changed.

Be nice to each other.

Anyway, this is what I tell my nieces when it comes to Christmas and all year long. The Golden Rule isn’t a bad one although I think we say it sometimes more that we live it. Be nice, be tolerant and remember that Jesus was cool and a very nice man. Don’t get above your britches. Don’t want things that others will have to sacrifice to give you.

It’s not about what Jesus would do. It’s about what we should do.

There is the lesson of the nativity and Jesus as I see it. I don’t usually write about these things, but this was what was on my mind this morning.

Do what you can and then just a little bit more.  It’s not a hard lesson.