We all get them—those long, boring accounts of the latest family accomplishments conveniently tucked inside a Christmas card. But not all Christmas letters are like that. Some can be highly interesting and inspirational. Have you received any like that this year?

Here’s one that Eb Roell, a retired missionary living in Boulder, Colo., and the author of Piercing the Night, sent out this year and gave us permission to reprint here:

We’re creatures of habit, and habits, such as the “How are you?” inquiry, tend to lose meaning. Likewise, after 2000 years, our commercialized Christmas is but a caricature of what was arguably the most significant event in history; gone is its wonder, faded its realism.

Had the incarnation of the Christ been late—just a divine two days, say—the first Christmas could have been celebrated in the age of the internet, with attention-grabbing headlines such as “Inn Rejects God,” “Virgin Births E.T.” and “God Born in Homeless Shelter.”

The guiding star might have been a GPS. The wise men from the East could have been Emperor Akihito, the Dalai Lama, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The presents? How about a Lexus LS600hL from the emperor to replace Mary and Joseph’s aging Volkswagen; the “Light of Truth” award, apropos, by the Tibetan priest; and competing promises of peace by Ki-moon.

In keeping with His rejection by the powers that “would have been,” the Babe’s significance announced in the Knesset would create uproar among ultra-orthodox Jews, and a “Welcome to Our Planet” speech by our president would be decried as a violation of the Establishment Clause and evoke a verbal hemorrhage by anti-Christian liberal unions. Those among us who decided that He is “the real deal” would, just the same, be disparaged by our cultural elite as naïve, easily led intellectual weaklings.

Therefore, I trust you’ll bear with me as I list that Babe’s powerful impact on the affairs of humankind as evidenced in Christianity’s historic force for good, unparalleled in the practice of any other religious, philosophical, or political ideology. For lost in the tardiness would be . . .

. . . a time capsule in which some of His followers, imperfect though they were, had put that “naïveté” to work when they pushed back the boundaries of ignorance in almost every field of knowledge; modernized the nursing profession and organized this globe’s most extensive network of healthcare facilities; through Bible translation alphabetized over 2,500 languages, thereby contributing to the enlightening of Stone Age tribes in the most remote corners of the earth; pioneered the abolition of slavery in Europe and America; established the most far-reaching disaster-relief organizations on the planet; formed a bulwark against atheism and communism, in the name of which 100 million-plus souls perished; created some of the world’s finest music and works of art; started the alma mater for no less than 13 British prime ministers—Oxford University’s Christ Church; founded civilization’s most stable, most prosperous, and most generous republic and were instrumental in  the formation of some of its choicest institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

However, God wasn’t late—never is. And behind the façades of Santa Claus, the winter solstice, Easter bunnies, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and ironically, an air of intellectual superiority in PC garb, a wayward Western culture in general, and the United States in particular, continues to reap the benefits of that Babe’s impact. No wonder then that, as the saying goes, “Wise men still seek Him.”

Merry Christmas!