When I think of Christmas when I was a kid, my mind is flooded with many amazing memories.  Memories are like snowflakes falling from the sky.  Each one different!  Each one unique!  And when they are all gathered together, they create a lovely tapestry in your mind that can cause much wonderment.

My parents loved Christmas and with one brother and three sisters, there was a lot of excitement around the house on Christmas Morning.  I was blessed to be born into a family that loved Christmas!  My family was close knit and I could probably fill a book with Christmas memories and special moments with family, friends and our church family over the years.  Gifts were plentiful and my parents always made certain that we never forgot the real, true meaning of Christmas and what Jesus Christ came to this earth to accomplish.

One Christmas in particular sticks in my mind.  I do not remember the exact year but I remember the moments of that Christmas morning like it was yesterday.  One of my gifts under the tree was a stereo for my bedroom!  I was somewhere around 10 years old and it was my first stereo.  I had a small, portable cassette player and two or three cassettes but this stereo played cassettes and records, had an AM/FM Radio and had a nice, rich sound (at least for that day) in the four speakers that came with it!

Along with the stereo came quite a bit of music!  Music by the Cathedral Quartet, the Kingsmen Quartet, the Blackwood Brothers, the Speer Family, the Couriers, the Hinsons and more!  I could not wait to get that stereo hooked up and once I did, I played and played and played that music (and added to my music collection at every opportunity) and stereo for the next several years.

It was in playing those records, listening to those great groups and those inspired lyrics that a dream of being a Radio DJ was born.  I would sit in my bedroom and imagine that I was interviewing George Younce, Glen Payne, Jim Hamill, Brock Speer, James Blackwood, Ronny Hinson, etc. and introducing the next big song in Southern Gospel Music! That I would go on to interview them and many others and play countless songs over the airways is truly a childhood dream come true.

I love how God used Christmas Gifts from parents and siblings to inspire a young man and plant a seed that he would never outgrow.  The Bible talks about in Proverbs how God directs our steps and God never wastes a moment or an event.  The good, the bad, the sometimes seemingly inconsequential events are all being orchestrated by God to mold us unto what He wants us to be!

Praise God we serve a loving Savior who can use a Christmas gift to help orchestrate getting His message out on radio 40 years in the future!  How cool is that?