At the time of the first Christmas, it is written that Wise Men from the East came to Jerusalem seeking the Christ Child. They came because they had seen a star and something about the star caught their attention. Perhaps its brilliance – or its peculiar position in the heavens – or something about its conjunction with other heavenly bodies made them look up and take notice.

And the star spoke to their hearts.

In its light, the Wise Men experienced the love of God!

And that’s more miraculous than you might realize!

You know, Alpha Centauri is the star cluster nearest earth. It is actually not one, but three stars. The dimmest, Alpha Proxima, is the closest to our planet. The others, Alpha Centauri 1 and 2, are a close binary system, and appear as a single, very bright star. The star system is about 8 TRILLION miles away from us. That’s four and a half light years! And that means something fantastic!

The light you and I see when we look up at Alpha Centauri at night actually left the star four and a half years ago!

Now we don’t know what the actual star was that the Wise Men saw, but we can speculate on something really cool based upon what we know about Alpha Centauri since it is the closest star to earth! It must have been at least four and a half years before the Wise Men ever saw that star that God released a pulse of light from its surface!

And that burst of light streamed over unbelievable distances, and through all sorts of interstellar stuff so that, one night – timed to the exact second – that ray of light crossed into the earth’s upper atmosphere just as a hole appeared in the nighttime overcast and these three Persian guys stepped out of a local bowling alley to go home for the night….

And in that exact instant, that little burst of light from four and a half or more years earlier passed through the corneas of their eyes, and through the lens, and focused on the retina, and stimulated the optic nerve, and …

THEY SAW IT!

“Look!” they shouted.

And the rest is history!

That there is a real Christmas miracle, don’t you think?

I wonder how the light first came to you!?