By: Curtis Baker
Christmas is my favorite time of year. I don’t think it would be false to say that my whole year orients around Christmas. I love it when the leaves are beginning to change—when I know Thanksgiving is right around the corner; and I love Thanksgiving knowing that the next day we get to put up the Christmas tree. I also love bringing out the Christmas music Thanksgiving night. I bring out the same CD’s I listen to every year and there are two songs that really put me in the mood. One is an a-cappella version of “O Come All You Faithful,” and the second is a version of “O Holy Night,” which I think is the greatest song ever written. After hearing those I am in the full Christmas mood.
I love everything about Christmas. I love the cold weather, I love the smell of fireplaces, I love the music, I love the anticipation; and I never miss watching Rudolph and Frosty the Snow man each year. I love it so much that my wife and my mother bought me the DVD because I missed it one year and it nearly ruined my Christmas! (Well, maybe that is an overstatement) However, now that I am older, what I love most of all is just getting to be with my family. Since I have lost several family members in the last couple of years, it is very important to me to get to be with family for Christmas. The spirit of this time of year is the thing I look forward to the most. Despite all of the shopping chaos, for the most part, people are kinder and more considerate of each other. For a brief moment each year Christmas gives us a picture of the world as it should be.
However, I am not naive. I know that Christmas is not everyone’s favorite time of year. For some, it is the hardest time of the year. Since Christmas gives us a glimpse of the world as it should be, it also points out the hard realities of the human condition: loneliness, poverty, violence, and selfishness. For some people, Christmas is a time they fear and hope will pass soon.
Christmas sheds light on the best and the worst in our world. It brings happiness to the blessed and accentuates the pain of those who feel they have been cursed. The good news for everyone is that the Christmas story is large enough to encompass all the good and bad of our world. Christ knows the pain of scandal, poverty, and violence just as many of us do. After all, he was born to parents who were not married; he was born in a barn because the world had no room for him; and many babies died because of his birth when King Herod sought him out. Jesus is not some lofty God who doesn’t know our pain. He knows very well what it is like to live in loneliness, scandal, and poverty.
The good news is, because he has lived through those things, he also knows how to save us from those things. This is the true message of Christmas. Our God loved us so much that he left the perfect company of heaven to live a lonely and destitute life to show us a way of living that overcomes evil. He died so that we could be free of sin.
This week we celebrate the coming of God into our frail world. Many of you will experience the joy of Christmas again. Others of you may wish it passes soon. Wherever you find yourself this Christmas, know that there is a God who loved you enough to come and endure all the same things you experience, and promises to save you from them.
May his blessings be unto you, and may you have a very Merry Christmas.
