The best part about Christmas is where it leads.

If Christmas was just one day with camels and sheep and donkeys and a stable and angels and Mary and Joseph and God’s only son born in a manger then it’s still a pretty great day. But it doesn’t end there.

It’s an entire story.

And Christmas is not even the beginning of the story. It’s actually the beginning of the middle. It’s a long, long story from our perspective. So long, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine. But let’s try.

Pretend that time is a book you can hold in your hand. The first page is the beginning of everything. The last page is the end. You can flip through the entire thing. That is the Christmas story.

Here’s another way to picture it . . .

Chris Harrison's visualization of Bible cross references showing interconnection.

Chris Harrison’s visualization of Bible cross references showing interconnection.

This is is a visualization of a database of 63,779 textual cross references in the Bible. It was created by Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University and Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor. It begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation. Each arc is a connection between verses of the Bible, written years, decades, centuries and even millenia apart by different authors in multiple languages. Click the picture for a full screen view. (More detailed info HERE)

Their point is to show the interconnectedness of the Bible. Another word you might use is consistency.

My point is this, it’s more than a collection of short stories. It’s all one big story, and Christmas is just a part of it. To celebrate Christmas alone would be missing the point.

Merry Christmas everyone.