The Christmas message brings with it love, joy, peace and
hope. The coming of Jesus as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem promises all this.
Who doesn’t want some of each? With the ongoing war in Ukraine and Sudan, with
unrest everywhere, including our homes – peace is in huge demand. We read that
loneliness looms in too many lives, people looking for and desiring to love and
be loved. Economic struggles, serious illness, job insecurity have all of us longing
for hope. And wouldn’t a taste of joy make a huge difference to the grieving,
depressed world around us?
The Christmas season always comes with the promise of good
things. We fill our homes and outdoor spaces with light. We race around
preparing food and buying gifts to put smiles on the faces of our loved ones.
We find ourselves at concerts, markets, movies looking to fill our hearts with
that Christmas spirit. If anything could bring love, joy, peace and hope it
should be the result of all this effort during this season of promise.
What usually happens is anything but that. We become grumpy,
stressed out, frustrated consumers of an empty promise. The experience of love,
joy, peace and hope are fleeting, if we experience them at all. All the effort
we put into making Christmas magical can often fall far short of our
expectations, and we are just left with tiredness. Anyone who has sat in an
empty house after the celebration can speak to the emptiness and
disillusionment of the season.
But we’ve also all
tasted joy, peace, love and hope. That taste has left us longing for so much
more than the momentary fulfillment. We exert all this effort during Christmas
hoping this year it’ll last beyond the dirty dishes, crumpled paper and
discarded toys. But how?
I’ve been my family matriarch for 30 years, hosting
Christmas. I inherited the role after my mother died. I had no idea what I was
getting into. I knew my mother had made Christmas magical, and I knew I wanted
to continue that tradition for my family. My nephew was born the following
year, and a child put even more stress on making things wonderful. I have sat
in my empty house after everyone went home, my husband upstairs usually
finishing the dishes and me looking at the enormous stack of empty boxes and
huge bag of wrapping paper and wondering, exhausted after weeks of work, if it
was worth it for a fast over and out.
Often I lacked the peace, hope, love and joy.
But through the years I have learned that if I change my
focus a bit, I can experience all of those promised gifts. Certainly
decorations and food preparation, shopping and activities have a part, but not
the central point. First of all, it begins with refocusing on Jesus Christ.
“How can we know that
the Christmas story matters at all if we don’t fully grasp our great need for a
Savior? So many of us scurry about at Christmastime hoping to find meaning in
this season, when the true gift of the birth of Christ is found in unfathomable
love in the heart of God. Try as we might, we can’t muster up the feelings we
want to feel at Christmas; we will experience the magnitude of Christmas only to
the extent that we understand the grace and mercy of God’s plan of redemption.”
(Ruth Chou Simons)
Jesus entered the world in a stable, and there are very few
magical elements in a barn, except maybe baby animals. A place where animals
stay is not a place to give birth, even in a more primitive time. But that was
the point. God came to live among all of us, and He chose to come in the most
humble of situations. His first guests were shepherds. (The wise men came a bit
later.) The shepherds had the light of the angels, but the stable was probably
pretty dark. Yet there in those humble beginnings lay the Light of the World,
the Gift of hope, love, peace and joy. God chose to enter our space, become
fully human with the goal of dying in our place so we can have relationship
with Him.
If I put my focus on Jesus, on my gratitude for the grace of
having God with me, it helps shift my experience. I try to start my day with
devotional reading. This year I am going through a list of advent readings that
trace from prophecies in the Old Testament to New Testament readings about the
promised Christ. (theadventusproject.worldpress.com) Then I found this
wonderful book of readings for the Advent Season, Emmanuel: an Invitation to Prepare Him Room at Christmas and Always,
by Ruth Chou Simons. (Harvest House Publishers, 2022) And finally, I’m reading
a couple of Psalms each day. Starting my days with these readings and prayer
sets my focus. I also, throughout the day, as I start to feel anxious or
stressed, ask “what can I do about it?” I can give it to God for His peace.
This is really the only response for so many things. For the things I can
change I can ask, do I really need to do all this? What can I pare away to give
myself more space? Part of this, for me, is taking time to smell the roses (or
the pine tree). Sometimes we just need to sit down and breathe.
Along with focusing on Christ, I have also have learned to
focus on people. Too much time is spent on worrying over whether what I’ve made
or decorated or wrapped will reflect well on me, whether they will like the
thing. But if my focus is really on them, then as I bake or decorate I do so
praying for and thinking about the people whom I am doing this for (and accepting
that way too much of the time is really spent doing it for me). I pray that
those with whom I spend time will feel the presence of Jesus, His love, joy,
peace and hope. And I try to make sure that the activities I choose to do
throughout the season involve spending time with friends and family with little
or no agenda, just time given. This has enabled me to say “no, I don’t need to
do that”, whatever extra “that” is.
We host a party every year. I’ve learned that guests come
for the people, not the peripherals. Certainly decorations and food set the
stage, but the feedback is always about the interactions. And God has so
honored my prayer that everyone feel His love and presence. Last year a small
group of us just sat around talking late into the night.
Last Christmas, difficult because we’d just lost my sister,
really ended up being such a sweet day. I poured a lot of prayer into handling
our loss. At the end of the day my brother set up a slide show of our growing
up, pictures my brother-in-law had never seen of my sister. It was such a
lovely, healing time. And then we rather spontaneously had a sleep over, since
the slide show finished late. We woke up and shared breakfast together. It made
the leaving easier, beyond dirty dishes and empty boxes.
In switching up the focus (and believe me, this is never
100%, perfectly accomplished by any means) I have found joy, peace, love and
hope in the season. Because, let’s be honest, except for focusing on the Source
of true love, joy, peace and hope, they are really just fleeting pipe
dreams. But in Christ I can have it all,
if I just turn my focus to Him and what He would have me doing to celebrate His
birth
For God so loved the World that He gave His only Son – John
3:16
God is Love I John 3:8
I (Jesus) came that you might have joy full and complete John
15:11; 16:23
My peace I give you John 14:27; 16:33
He is our peace Ephesians
2:14
Christ in you, the hope of glory Colossians 1:27
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we
have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which
we now stand. And we boast in the hope
of the glory of God…And hope does not
put us to shame, because God’s love
has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given
to us.” Romans 5:1-5
“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control” Galatians
5:22
“May the God of hope
fill you with all peace as you trust
in Him, so that you may overflow with hope
by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Romans 15:13
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