Rejoice! It is still a good world. Rejoice!

~For years, Jean Bell Mosley of Cape Girardeau and Thomza Zimmerman of Advance, Mo., wrote a weekly column called "From Dawn to Dusk," first in the Bulletin-Journal and then in the Southeast Missourian, that took the form of personal messages to each other. Here is the column Mrs. Mosley wrote in December 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War and the same year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Then, as now, Mrs. Mosley's thoughts looked beyond a world of discouragement and saw the hope of a birth in a manger.

Hollyhock Hill

Dec. 19, 1968

Dear Thomza:

Once again I wish you a Merry Christmas. May your house smell of oranges, cedar, bayberry and gingerbread men. May your fires sparkle brightly and candlelight glow on the cheeks of your Santa and the halos of your angels and all the little Christmas pixies who live under the couch, behind the pictures and in the drawers of the spice cabinet. May all your candies and cookies and cakes be the best you ever made, and may all the presents you give be exactly what your friends wanted and the ones that you receive be your heart's desire.

So much for the glitter and glow. What I would really like for everyone to experience would be the questioning wonder of the shepherds as they went with haste to see if what they had been told was true. And I would that you would have the sure knowledge, as had the shepherds, that it was, and that time and events and changing morals and more can never change it.

Perhaps then you can look back on the past year, remember the mule train carrying Martin Luther King's body to his grave, and Andy Williams singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at Bobby's funeral, and the televised picture of an execution in the streets of Saigon -- all these and more, and have the courage to go on, knowing in your heart of hearts that it is still basically and fundamentally a good world.

When the shepherds had seen and were satisfied, they went back to the sheep, for they were in charge of that little part of the world's business. There were wolves to fend off and thieves to discourage. But what a difference there must have been in their work after that.

Later, when this Child whom the shepherds had gone to see had finished his ministry, another ordinary workman said, "I'll go back to my fishing." But what a different place the world was for Peter!

So, we, too, after re-experiencing the meaning of the most important birthday of all, must go back to the sheep, back to the fishing, back to the schools, the factories, the laboratories, back to the little part of the world we are in charge of. May there ever be the Great Difference, the difference that makes you look at the world around you and re-echo an old, old pronouncement, "It is good."

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Jean Bell Mosley