Early morning hours on Hope Hill are magic moments when all that is human is quiet and only those heavenly diamonds are "heard" declaring the glory of God. Friend Orion and faithful Polaris (North Star) are always in their places each Christmas morning—we can trust the God who made a universe like that!

Your Christmas greetings, warm and cheery, have been filling our mailbox for weeks. We wish that we could respond to each one with all the gratefulness that each one deserves. Everything about Bethlehem every twelve months refocuses priorities and deepens the sense of family, nuclear and extended. After all, as some of your messages noted the loss of spouses, how many more Christmases will any of us have! And the sense of loss, that missing place at the table, can only be handled with the knowledge that the Bethlehem boy came to destroy the fear of death and to help us look higher than the casket.

That’s why on precious occasions such as this, it is well for us to think not of our five-year plans but of our Five-Zillion Year Plans!

2000 was amazing (looking back) but getting through it was some trip! Historic Adventist Village in Battle Creek surely focuses us, throughout the day and even the night hours! This past year more than 11,000 people met costumed hosts/hostesses at eight open sites. The general public arrives in their tour buses, hearing and seeing the common sense principles that made sense more than a century ago and make even more sense today. Keeping this project before Adventists young and old, sent us to our booths at the Loma Linda Alumni Postgraduate Convention, the ASI meeting in Hawaii and later at Grand Rapids, our quinquennial General Conference in Toronto, and then Dallas (where I also presented an address on "How the (Book) Education Unfolds the Great Controversy Theme."

On June 29, 30, 2001, we would be delighted to see you all in the Village, helping to dedicate the fully restored Ellen and James White Home to mint National Registry standards. This is the pearl of the Village and the site where thousands of overseas visitors long to see first!

In November, we rounded out the year (even as we did last year) traversing the Panama Canal, but this time going the other way! When we get tickets for $599 (11 days) we felt it obscene not to cooperate with the Princess crowd!

We live with never-ending gratitude for golden memories, even if clouded at times, for platinum hopes that tug us into the future, for fantastic children with their families even to

making us great-grandparents (!), for tears that come in suffering as well as appreciation, for the joy of being loved and wanted, for the peace of pardon daily and of power during tough times, for hope that comes fresh every morning and for knowing that the future is always brighter than the past, for His grace that sought us before we sought Him, and that sustains us whatever the circumstances, and that paints Heaven in our hearts.

If anybody has the time, guru brother, Melvyn, created a web site at herbdouglass.50megs.com. for recent sermons, talks, etc. Remember, the trumpets you hear are not sounding Taps, but Reveille. It won’t be long!