In Dresden we walked on the city square right by the front door of the major cathedral. The square was filled with booths that reminded me of walking down the midway at the Texas State Fair. It was bitterly cold but the square was filled with people milling through the spaces between the booths where you could buy anything from beer to sausage to handmade trinkets to miniature nativity sets. It was called "Christmas Market." On the archway over the entrance to the Christmas market in Dresden was a sign that said this was the 554th year that Christmas Market had been held in Dresden. Every city we visited in East Germany including Wittenberg, Viemar, Leipzig, Dresden and Frankfurt has a Christmas Market in the town square during the four weeks of Advent.

Now, think about that. Think of what that kind of history means to each generation, especially to those living in an atheistic society. The very existence of a church building has got to be a string around society's finger to remind them of a faith that once existed in something other than dialectical materialism. Some of those carpenters, masons, and artisans who worked to restore these magnificent cathedrals have to ask themselves, "Why is this pulpit here?" "What do you reckon was said from it?" "What do those clusters of grapes carved in the table represent?" "What does the cross mean?" "Who was this person who is hanging on the cross?" A string around the finger!

To what extent the current upheaval in the Eastern Bloc countries is due to these strings around the corporate fingers, we will never know. I can't help but believe that in a society where atheistic communism has failed so miserably, the more recent generations may be reminded that there is another way.

The news out of Budapest was reported by a reporter who saw, on the edge of the fighting where tanks where rolling, a poignant scene. Imagine watching from a window as tanks are rolling and people are shooting and are shot and then seeing off to one side a man on his way home on a bicycle with a Christmas tree. In the midst of revolution, the tree was a reminder of life and hope associated with the birth of the Prince of Peace.

Every Christmas is our reminder that there is a guide through the moral wasteland of modern life.

He whose birth we celebrate said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." As I think about the major problems we face in our culture, I see the terrible price we are paying for not living life His way. The disintegration of the family through desertion and divorce is exacting a terrible toll on the psyches of the next generation. One analyst went so far as to say that the major cause of violence and drug abuse rises out of hostility created in the children of divorce. I think that is too simplistic, but it is at least one part of the equation. It used to be syphilis and gonorrhea were the gremlins of hanky-panky and we made jokes about those who were "queer" or "different" and didn't have to worry about the social diseases, but now AIDS is no joking matter and statistics show that more than 80 percent of all those who have the AIDS virus contracted it through homosexual activity.