Ideal December

My wife, Ingrid, and I were talking yesterday about how we might keep Christmas simple this year in order to focus on the things that really matter. (This, by the way, is a conversation we have every year, and sometimes it actually makes a difference!) The thing about festivals and holidays is that you have to be intentional about focussing on meaning and avoiding distraction. It doesn’t happen automatically.

My ideal December includes:

1) No pushing and shoving in the shopping malls because gift shopping was finished before Thanksgiving. 2) Christmas tree up and trimmed before December 1 so that we can be assured that all the dry needles will leave an unholy mess in the house, stirred up by the cats, by the time we get to New Years Day. 3) The collection of at least three fruitcakes because I am one of the few people in the world who actually likes eating them, even knowing that the next gift fruitcake I am given has probably been re-gifted three times before it gets to me. 4) Watching Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the longest running TV show in history, 50 years in a row now (the Island of Misfit toys gets me every time). 5) Places for worship, not only in a church, but also, perhaps, on a late afternoon walk when large snowflakes emerge from heavy skies reminding me of the things that come to earth from a hidden, higher place.

My ideal December would include no heartache, no emergency room visits, no disappointments, no personal failings. But I have no right to expect the ideal. I’d like life to be like the landscape covered over by fresh-fallen white snow. But on any given day life can look like the dirty snowbanks we tire of in March. We have to take life as it comes. That’s just reality.

All the more reason to be intentional about focussing on the one who brings light into the darkness, the Lord and giver of life, the anointed one. No cliches, no platitudes, no two-dimensional Jesus.

In his teaching Jesus many times said “this is why I have come.” Normal people don’t speak that way. And nobody promised what he did.

And so we celebrate within a season called Advent, which comes from the Latin verb meaning “coming.”

I plan on sending out an email each Saturday over the next four weeks with a reading and a prayer for each successive Advent Sunday: November 30; December 7; December 14 and December 21. I hope you will find them helpful for your personal worship during this time. Maybe you’d even like to set up candles on your dining table and light them in succession on the days you do the reading yourself or with your family (google “how to set up an advent wreath”). (If you’re not on The Brook Network email list, you can sign up HERE.)

I so often think of the line from the famous carol that goes “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Jesus is the focus of our hope and the comforter for our fears.

Mel Lawrenz

P.S. If you’d like to share this message with others who may want to follow along, use the sharing links above. Sign up for the weekly email HERE.

P.P.S And for eager beavers who would like to do a daily reading for each day in December, our devotional “Christmas Joy” is now available in softcover or Kindle HERE.