Since I can remember I have always loved Thanksgiving and Christmas, as many people do. It's fun-filled and for me it's definitely a nostalgic time of year. Yet for the past couple of years a certain uneasiness has come over me as I think about entering in each holiday season. The feeling could always be rationalized into some reason that simply pushes it aside to minimize it as if to stay distracted from ever contemplating the reasons for the uneasiness. It seems as thought this year I've observed this feeling play out in similar ways and am beginning to understand a bit more of what it is and why I feel it. I for one have this notion as I'm sure many others do that the holidays is a time for joy and cheer. NOT moping, being sad, dealing with stuff in your life, and wanting to take a break more than add more fiestas to your life. Somehow that is not the message I hear during this time of year. So as I feel this tension between the reality of life and the "reality" of the holidays, I wanted to share with you some of my insights.
Like many people in this entire planet, we like to do things. We like to have things to do, projects to complete, missions to accomplish and above a lot of things we hate to sit in boredom. Boredom makes us frustrated, and depressed. Naturally so, because we were made to be adventurously living out a unique purpose for the Kingdom's cause. And yet, much like the ways of this world, things are never in balance. We like to have activities, hang out with people, organize and/or participate in events, often at the cost of our necessity in "being". Our discipline still needing refining, timing never seeming to be on our side and good intentions to stop and "be" fail to be carried through somehow. That's so much of our lives and it's something even the wisest people I know still work at all the days of their life. I wonder if perhaps it's hard to do because it often means we must face our own reality and be sobered by our own brokenness and pain and of course, no one likes that. And yet it's so critical to who God shapes us to be; it's the process of character formation. Tying that into the Christmas season, of course life gets real busy during this time. If there's not final exams to pass, there's meetings to attend, extended family to prepare for, shopping to do, parties to attend, sleep to catch up on, bills to pay, lights to hang, christmas pageants to organize....its goes on forever! What I've learned is when life gets busy we forget to attend to the current state of our heart. When that happens, I've found it gets easier to do so, until at some point we start to feel the ache of our ignored hungry heart.
Materialism does not help any... if not it starves our aching hearts more. Of course marketing experts know what they're doing around this time of year. They know how to entice us with warm and fuzzy commercials to get you to buy disgusting cookies. They know how to shove ads and commercials into our faces to convince us we need to go shopping at 5 AM to buy things we don't really need. Of course it takes no genius to realize that what they are selling you, like all other advertised material possessions, is a value or experience (love, belonging, comfort, acceptance, fun, adventure, ect). After all humanity knows what it's been longing for since the dawn of creation. It's just that we are fallen and live accordingly many times. That is just some of what all of the materialistic holiday season is enticing us with. We long for it, ache for it and easily fall for less than the Real source of those things. So even if we don't buy it or get into it, we hear it. Lie after lie comes thrown at us at the time of the year when we crave love, acceptance, belonging, adventure, purpose, freedom ect. all are at the forefront of our hearts. All such things advertised and often expected at Christmas time such as keeping busy, ignoring our problems and valuing material things keep us from holding near our one true Source of all the things we long for deep down.
Christmas can be so good and filling, but it can also be so detrimental and heart-aching. How we respond to the moments around Christmas to reflect, remember what Jesus did for us, and be thankful, depend greatly on the perspective of your heart. I can see how that uneasy feeling about Christmas was rooted in the lies that can seep into our hearts about who we are finding our longings filled in. I can understand now why the holiday season can give you all kinds of reasons to neglect the honest, sometimes gritty work your heart needs in it's refining process. Much of the holiday season invites you to sit back and mindlessly munch your way through until the new year. And yet how ironic that is the flip-side of such a wondrous season: Jesus humbly came to save, set free and forever love us. He came to free us so every one of our heart-aches can be filled and one day wholly filled so we can be who were were always meant to be. For those of you like me, who identify with the uneasiness of this season, I pray you may find a deeper change within your heart to be more free and more deeply filled by the One who set this very season in motion for This very intent.
So in every sense of the phrase...Merry Christmas!
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