I often wake up with a hymn or chorus on my mind. I awoke Christmas morning with the words of an old hymn, \u201cEre you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?\u201d It may have been motivated by a cartoon by my friend Joe McKeever, in which Mary and Joseph are around the manger with Mary holding the baby Jesus, and Joseph exclaiming, \u201cLet\u2019s stop, Honey, and thank God for Jesus.\u201d It caused me to wonder if anyone prayed at the manger. After the shepherd\u2019s had seen Jesus, they returned, \u201cpraising God\u201d (Luke 2:20). According to Matthew 2:11, the wise men \u201cfell down and worshipped\u201d Jesus when they saw Him. While these could have been references to prayer, there is no specific reference to prayer as such, nor is there other biblical reference to anyone praying at the birth of Jesus. That thought caused me to paraphrase the 1876 hymn to, \u201cEre you left the manger this morning, did you think to pray?\u201d Then my mind shifted into the present and I asked myself, what I had included in my Christmas morning prayer that specifically related to the birth of Jesus. So on this day after Christmas, I turn the question to you. On Christmas Day, did you think to pray _to \u201cthank God for Jesus\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I often wake up with a hymn or chorus on my mind. I awoke Christmas morning with the words of an old hymn, \u201cEre you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?\u201d It may have been motivated by a cartoon by my friend Joe McKeever, in which Mary and Joseph are around…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}