Courtesy of Bishop Fulton Sheen

In reading the daily devotionals of Advent and Christmas by Fulton Sheen I was really struck by this particular day's:

"For old age is not honored

for length of time

or measured by number of years;

but understanding is grey hair for anyone,

and a blameless life is ripe old age...

Being perfected in a short time

they fulfilled long years;

for their souls were pleasing to the Lord

therefore He took them quickly..."

Wisdom 4:8-9, 13-14

"There is no escape from the tremendous fact of Christmas Day, that when God revealed Himself to this poor world of ours, men cried in astonishment "Why, it is a child?" And so it is that the closer we get to God the more we become children, and the closer God gets to us the more He becomes a Child. No one in the world ever suspected that the Ancient of Days who presided at creation would take His throne in that creation as a babe in a crib, just as no one ever thought He would tell the old men of forty, like Nicodemus, that they must be born again.

"According to all worldly standards, it is the aged who are learned. And yet when Wisdom came to earth He was a child, and when Wise Men came to Wisdom they were told to be like children. Christmas, then, is the coronation of childhood,the glorification of the young whose hearts are simple, the proclamation to aging hearts that the world need not despair and die, because the Fountain of Youth has come into it... turn time backwards, make old things young again."

~Fulton Sheen

emphasis added... not that it needed it.....