At my advanced age of sixty-two, I’ve experienced Christmas in a great variety of styles and settings. I can remember a White Christmas, a Florida Christmas, Christmas mornings fighting fires and our first Christmas as a married couple. I remember most of one Christmas day spent with a friend , dying of cancer. Then there was the Christmas in Florida when I was age 5 , I was convinced that I had seen Santa and his whole entourage, out in our front yard. I remember it just like it was yesterday. I remember my family usually cut down our own Christmas tree and I remember…… wait, slow down. I have entirely too many stories to include them all here, but you probably get the point.
Let’s do a word association exercise, a very short one. When I say Christmas what is the first emotion or feelings word or phrase that comes to mind? Got it? How about an example? I say Christmas and you say, excitement, for example, or love , or joy, etc. If we stayed with the word Christmas and you searched for a few more emotional/ feelings words, most of us would come up with six or eight words on our list and some even more. My list includes joy, and love, excitement, and anxiety. Anticipation, Stress, guilt, magical, etc… Christmas is a really big show for almost all of us; probably more so when we are young and have young children and maybe more problematic the older we get. You just don’t carry that much emotional baggage about a holiday without it having some significant meanings attached. A good many people, Christians included have troubles with anxiety and depression during this season. Heightened expectations, melancholy, all can result from looking for the magic in places where they probably will not find it. In my blog last year I used the term, Santa Claus angst , in a humorous way to describe almost every ones adult dilemma with what we were taught about Christmas as children. Andy and I started out our lives together creating our own traditions for the holidays and we still enjoy them and make them a part of our activities. Anyone who knows me, knows that finding laughter and seeing the comic relief is an important part of my life but, sad to say, sarcasm is not a spiritual gift. I checked the lists again tonight. Read my blog and some of my poems, although not gems of literature, have become places where I occasionally meet the Holy Spirit and grow to know our Lord in deeper places. I don’t believe we Christians are helping Christ’s work by trying to be fragile, perfect, sterile museum pieces who look like we would break if we laughed. There is another side, however. We are citizens of a foreign Kingdom , sojourning in another land. We should carry a strong family resemblance to our Lord and be a peculiar people but peculiar in a sense that people are drawn to join us. If Christ is not shining through and reflecting off of us, we should get in His presence until we are changed. Okay Lord, please help me say what you want me to say before I put everyone to sleep, someone is always saying something to that effect. The old admonition that if I am pointing one finger at you, my reader, I clearly have three pointed back at me is definitely applicable to me ! We who call ourselves Christians should examine ourselves and see where we are still giving like the lost. We should be so amazed that we have such an awesome opportunity to grow the kingdom during Christmas. Totally secular TV and movie programming have the gospel almost being preached and they don’t even realize it. Everywhere you look people are listening to Christmas music while it is feeding into their Spirit the truth about God! Perhaps you saw the piece on You Tube about the choir, not standing together or in robes, who just start singing, unannounced, Handel’s Messiah in the middle of a shopping mall. It was great. People were being uplifted and ministered to and didn’t really know why. I’m hearing laughter in that scenario and it’s coming from the Holy Spirit. It’s almost like God is saying, My child, I’ve loaded the bases for you; all that needs to happen is for you to get in the game and people will be swept into the Kingdom. We got together with the kids tonight and the fun and laughter around our table is almost non stop but there is a larger truth than that.
Jesus Christ became the central truth and Person in my life and in Andy’s; and that has made all the difference. For us it was a pretty radical departure from life as it was to life after Christ. Some things seem to stay the same but if you look deep enough, Christ is doing a work in every place we give Him access. Christmas has just been made deeper and more holy as the years go by. It’s not always easy to include a spiritual aspect to our Christmas when kids were little ones, but we decided to do it anyway. In one example, everyone got Scripture written on slips of paper and as they finished reading they lighted a candle. The room started out dark and with the final verse read we turned on the Christmas tree lights. We had communion together, again, reading all scripture that applied and I felt I was to serve my kids and my family. I believe that making Christmas a place for deeper worship, and prayer and seeking after the Lord is what makes Christmas special and bears fruit from generation to generation. Jesus is all together lovely – His presence is exciting and contagious and it is the one place where friends and family members can be together without the enemies normal interruption and confusion. I really believe that satan flees when God’s people are worshipping Him. For one thing, God is there, inhabiting the praises of His people but also, satan can not bear to hear God get praise and he not, so his normal action is to leave, and wait for a more opportune time.
My mind went back to a small church on Green Street in about 1984. Christmas. It was a teaching I had given about the way the world uses the phrase , “Peace on earth and goodwill to men” in about every ad or jingle and doesn’t begin to understand what it means and what parts of the verse they leave out. At best, peace among and between men is fragile, and probably temporary. Even the absence of hostility is not really peace if it creates cold wars and threats. The point I am trying to make is that Jesus came to planet earth to give us a gift we have no way of securing for ourselves, and we need it this Christmas, right now
Well, that is Christmas for our family and you never really got to hear about Andy’s Christmas casserole, or the way we slowly and individually open our presents and endure applause, and a proper number of oohs and aahs before the next person opens one. I hope and pray for your Christmas to be full of the love and Peace of Jesus Christ and as much fun as ours will be.
Tom Hudgens
