{"id":2175,"date":"2022-11-29T08:54:45","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T13:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2175"},"modified":"2022-11-29T08:54:45","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T13:54:45","slug":"holiday-inn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/29\/holiday-inn\/","title":{"rendered":"Holiday Inn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.
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Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being.<\/em>

Irving Berlin, one of America\u2019s all-time great songwriters, knew he had written an all-time great song.
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Berlin was the inspiration for Holiday Inn<\/em>, a 1942 film based on the romantic rivalry within a song-and-dance team (Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire) in the setting of a rustic Connecticut nightclub that is open only on holidays.\u00a0
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Crosby woos the actress Marjorie Reynolds with his easy-going, mellow crooning.\u00a0 Astaire wows her with his high-octane dancing.\u00a0 She\u2019s drawn to both.\u00a0 Which guy will win her lasting devotion?\u00a0 Crosby prevails in the end, which merely opens the door for Astaire to wind up happily in the arms of someone else.\u00a0
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The movie\u2019s timeframe, which spans two years and one week, spotlights eight different holidays.\u00a0 Berlin wrote original songs to celebrate each one, transforming Holiday Inn<\/em> into a cinematic musical.\u00a0 But he was certain that it was his Valentine\u2019s Day song, \u201cBe Careful, It\u2019s My Heart,\u201d that would become a smash hit.\u00a0
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He was wrong.\u00a0
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Because December 25 comes around three times in the course of the movie, Berlin needed a Christmas song. \u00a0He wrote a quiet, unassuming piece called \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201d not even bothering to give it a prominent setting in the film.\u00a0 Eighty years later, we recognize it as the most beloved non-religious Christmas song of all time.\u00a0 It ultimately inspired a movie of the same title in 1954, which we\u2019ll look at more closely next week.\u00a0
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The movie also inspired an iconic brand in the world of travel.\u00a0 Kemons Wilson was so unimpressed with the roadside accommodations on a family trip to the East coast that he decided to enter the business himself.\u00a0 The architect working on Wilson\u2019s first facility in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, joked, \u201cYou should name it Holiday Inn, after the movie.\u201d\u00a0 The rest is hotel history.\u00a0
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Irving Berlin, for all his genius, failed to recognize the superiority of the song that was right in front of him.
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The same is true for those in Bible times who were keeping their eyes peeled for the arrival of the Messiah.\u00a0 Even if they had stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before, they didn\u2019t prove to be smart enough or discerning enough to recognize that God would choose to come into the world as a child.
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Children were widely regarded as \u201cnothings\u201d in the ancient world.\u00a0
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The word for \u201cchild\u201d in both Greek and Latin means \u201cone who does not speak.\u201d \u00a0While it\u2019s the nature of small children to be noisy, no one thought they were worth listening to.\u00a0
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A child was vulnerable, fragile, and dependent.\u00a0 Author and pastor John Ortberg observes in his book Who is This Man?,<\/em> \u201cThose were not qualities associated with heroism in the ancient world.\u00a0 A hero was someone who made things happen.\u00a0 A child was someone things happened to.\u201d\u00a0
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Hercules was different.\u00a0 According to Greek mythology, baby Hercules, while lying in his baby bed, was attacked by a pair of poisonous snakes.\u00a0 He strangled them both with his chubby hands.\u00a0 That was the Greeks\u2019 way of giving dignity to a toddler.\u00a0 He acted like a grown-up.
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But there is no evidence that Jesus was anything but a weak and helpless infant \u2013 someone who needed his diaper changed about every two hours.\u00a0 As if to emphasize this, Matthew, in his account of Jesus\u2019 birth, identifies him as \u201cthe child\u201d nine times.\u00a0
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Incredibly, this implies that God, in order to save the world, was willing to become vulnerable, fragile, and dependent.
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Exactly.<\/em>
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Looking ahead, the Hebrew prophets foresaw the Messiah\u2019s unexpected path: \u201cHe had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him\u2026 Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem\u201d (Isaiah 53:2,3).
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As we read Jesus\u2019 story backwards \u2013 knowing how things turned out \u2013 it\u2019s tempting to spotlight the few supernatural features in the accounts of his birth, like the appearance of the angels to the shepherds and the remarkable pronouncements of Simeon and Anna in the temple courts.\u00a0
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But chiefly we come face to face with a child \u2013 ordinary, unimpressive, unnoticed.\u00a0 Yet carrying in his fragile body \u201cthe hopes and fears of all the years.\u201d\u00a0
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Just because your life today feels ordinary and unnoticed doesn\u2019t mean that God isn\u2019t doing a special work in you, too.\u00a0
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After all, sometimes the song that\u2019s overlooked becomes the one that everyone ends up singing.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here.\u00a0Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being. Irving Berlin, one of America\u2019s all-time great songwriters, knew he… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2176,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[539],"class_list":["post-2175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2177,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175\/revisions\/2177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}