'Twas The Night Before Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve . . .  

Don’t be the innkeeper.

Make room for him, my friends.

Don’t tell him no and don’t shut him out and don’t send him away.

Open the door to your heart and let him in.

He just wants to come, like any baby waiting so long inside a mother’s womb.  He simply longs to enter your world, to stay with you always, to be present in every moment of your life.

His light is shining all over the world tonight and it is too bright to ignore.  Hear him knocking on your soul and understand that He is enough for you.  His forgiveness overshadows every failure.  His grace overcomes all guilt.  His glory abounds forever.  He alone provides hope and peace and comfort and salvation, and his great, unfailing love for us KNOWS NO END.

So please, don’t be the innkeeper. 

Let that baby king come in.  Draw him close to you, place him on your heart as you would any other tiny child, and breathe in the incredible goodness of him, our Emmanuel.

Our Savior.

Our Jesus.

Emmanuel

It’s December 13^th.   Twelve days until Christmas. 

Plenty of time.

Plenty of time to get the shopping done.  Plenty of time to wrap the gifts.  Plenty of time to trim the tree and mail the cards and bake the cookies. 

Don’t panic, my friends.  There is plenty of time.

I know how it goes.  We hustle and bustle all month long.  We rush around in a flurry, here, there, and everywhere.  Our minds race with all that must be done.  The commitments pile up and the lists grow longer and we wake up in a cold sweat fretting about whether we’re on track to accomplish all that we need to accomplish to pull this thing off. 

Did we remember to move the elf?  Did we remember to read the Jesse tree devotional?  Did we remember to put a treat in the advent calendar?  Did we actually order that gift for our mother-in-law, or did we just dream that we did?

It’s okay.  Christmas is busy.  We try to get things done early, but it’s tough to put much of a dent in the responsibilities that go along with making this much magic in a single month.  There are expectations this time of year – BIG ones – and most of them fall on us moms.

In addition to the myriad of roles we play every other day of the year - you know the ones – nurse, cook, housekeeper, chauffer, psychologist, rule enforcer, wife (that usually does seem to come in last, doesn’t it?), in December, we add a slew of duties to this mama position that can make our heads spin.

We do the planning and the decorating and the shopping and the baking and the surprising.  We create the cards and order the cards and stuff the cards and address the cards and stamp the cards and mail the cards.  We rack our brains to come up with the perfect gifts for everyone in the family and fuss about how much money we’ve spent to make everyone we love feel equally special.  We plan school celebrations and ornament exchanges and tacky sweater parties.  We cut and tape and tie and hide packages in places we might never find them again, and y’all, at six o’clock this morning I was using the tip of my pinky finger to spread Nutella on the tiny mouth of our elf, because, ya know, that sneaky little fella got into the candy jar last night while we are all sleeping lying awake trying to think of new elf tricks.

It’s okay.

Christmas is hard and I’m tired too.  My body shifted into overdrive the second we put away the pumpkin pie and my brain is turning to eggnog as I try to fulfill all the requests and requirements that go along with the biggest holiday of the year. 

But it’s okay.  I won’t get it all done and I won’t get it all right.  I will forget to send someone a card.  I will burn a batch of gingerbread cookies.  I will get him the wrong color and her the wrong size and I will worry about presents when the whole thing . . . the whole month . . . our whole life . . . is all about His presence.

I will screw up this Christmas because I am a mess, and isn’t it funny how He came?  Not in a royal palace, surrounded by the splendid majesty he deserved.  No.  He came in a barn.  He came in the middle of the dirt and the muck and the animals and the mess.

He came to be human, and the barn was the perfect place for him to enter the world, because it wasn’t perfect.  A king born in a messy barn was exactly the right setting, because he wants to settle himself in our mess.  He wants to settle in our messy hearts and stay forever.

So don’t panic, my friends.  Enjoy this Advent season.  Enjoy the hustling and the bustling and the extra obligations.  Enjoy the rushing and the racing and the added commitments.  Amid your shopping and wrapping and celebrating, feel the comfort he provides.  Feel the peace he brings.  Feel the hope he offers.  Feel his light and love envelop your soul as he settles deep within, content to stay as long as you let him.


There is plenty of time to get ready for Christmas. 


There is plenty of time to get ready for His coming. 

Because He’s already here.

One Mother to Another

I can’t seem to get Mary off my mind.

Can you even imagine?   

Do you think she knew the stories? 

Had she heard of a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, who died spiritually when they chose to disobey their Creator, leaving us all with a legacy of sin and the need for someone to take it all away?

Had Mary heard about Abraham and the trip he made up a mountainside to do the unthinkable?  Did she know how God provided a sacrificial lamb at the last moment to take Isaac’s place, so the boy did not have to die on that mountain at the hands of his father?

Do you think Mary knew the story of David, a shepherd boy whose incredible faith allowed him to slay a giant and become a king, the first in a line that led to THE King?

The angel came and told, and she trusted and carried and delivered a child who would be called the most beautiful names in history . . .

Prince of Peace

Son of Man

Lamb of God

Emmanuel

Messiah

Redeemer

Comforter

Healer

Teacher

Savior

Jesus.

Do you remember what it was like to be a mother for the first time?  The anxiety and worry and sleepless nights watching every breath to make sure he was happy and healthy and safe from harm.

What if you were up all night watching the One promised to save an entire world from itself?

What if you had to watch him take his first steps and climb his first hill and stumble and fall and cry for help?

Can you even imagine the weight of such responsibility? 

Not yet a bride, she was told she would bear the Son of God.  Not yet a woman, she gave birth to a King.  She had to hold him and mold him and no doubt scold him.  She had to watch him stumble and fall and cry while a crown of thorns sat atop his head, and a crowd of people who once called him their own chose to disown and disgrace and discard, and then she had to watch him die on a cross between two men whose only resemblance to Him was their flesh.

The angel called her favored, honored, chosen.

We call her Mary.

A lovely name.  A name always meant to go down in history, and it did, and it should.

But He called her Mom.

Can you even imagine?

The angel said to Mary, "Do not be afraid; you have found favor with God.  You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.  The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

Luke 1:30-33

 

I still can’t quite believe it’s over.  All that thought and time and energy and money put into one of the most wonderful days of every year, and now . . . it’s already two days past Christmas.  The good news, of course, is that Christmas is really just the beginning of the celebration.  It’s the day Jesus was born – the day God became man so we could begin to grasp the depth of his love for us.  The rest of his short life was equally as amazing and, don’t worry, there are even more donkeys and angels.  YAY!

Christmas this year was a whirlwind for me, as I imagine it might have been for many of you.  There were family gatherings and parties mixed in with all the decorating, shopping, wrapping, and cooking in a way that makes me wonder exactly where the month of December went.  Honestly, I think I spent most of it trying to come up with elf tricks. 

And now that Christmas Day has come and gone, and I’ve had a full day to reflect on the most magical time of the year . . . I’ve come up with two moments that defined my holiday season. 

The first came on Christmas Eve, smack in the middle of a beautiful candlelight service.  My nine-year-old was sitting to my left, my dad on the right.  Everyone was dressed up and the air was full of excitement and the joy could clearly be heard in the voices of the congregation, our voices lifted to the heavens in praise of the One who came to save.  My eyes filled with tears, as they often seem to do when thousands of people are singing together about Jesus, and I could actually feel the magic of Christmas flow through me.  And then, my precious son, dressed in his holiday best and bubbling over with anticipation about the hours ahead, leaned over to me, and with wide eyes and a very serious demeanor, asked the one question I’ve happily avoided for all of his nine Christmases so far.

“Mom, what exactly is a virgin anyway?”

I probably shouldn’t cuss on a blog about Jesus, but man, I sure wanted to at that moment.  In church.  On Christmas Eve.  

Not to worry.  I simply told my son we’d talk about it later.  The problem, of course, is that now it IS later, and because my son has the best memory of anyone I know, I feel quite certain the chat I’ve never wanted to have is going to happen any minute now.  Awesome.  Next Christmas, he’ll probably lean over and want to know exactly what those “band-aids for Mommies” are that sit in a box on the back of the potty for a few days every month, and I’ll be trying to figure out how to explain tampons while everyone else is belting out Joy to the World.

The second monumental moment of Christmas 2012 occurred at precisely 12:07 on Christmas Day.  The reason I know the exact time of this disturbing event?  It was the time on the clock when all of my Christmas decorations, minus the tree, were officially down and packed into tubs in the storage room, not to be seen again until next December.  An entire year of therapy and THAT’S how much my OCD has improved?  You’ve got to be kidding. I’d like to blame my insanity on the fact that we were leaving the house at 12:30 and not planning to return for over a week.  But really, I’m not sure that fact offers much of an excuse.  The scariest part of the whole deal is the way I felt when I looked at the clock at seven minutes past noon and realized the only thing left to do to “undecorate” was to take down the tree (which won’t happen until after our trip). 

I was ecstatic. 

And that, my friends, is why I need Christmas.  Because despite all my efforts . . . despite all my plans and intentions and prayers and dollars spent trying to work through my mess . . . I need Jesus. I will always need Jesus.   

And He is here.

Emmanuel.

God with us. 

May he bring peace into your lives as 2012 comes to a close, and my he bring peace into mine as well.  The kind of peace that settles my heart when I know I'm on the cusp of an important conversation.  The kind of peace that allows me to find calm in the midst of clutter.  The kind of peace only the Prince of Peace can offer.