“… behind all our fun and games at Christmastime, we should try not to escape a sense of awe, almost a sense of fright, at what God has done. We must never allow anything to blind us to the true significance of what happened at Bethlehem so long ago. Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet.”
– From J.B. Phillips essay, “The Dangers of Advent”
It was the end of Thanksgiving dinner and everyone headed for the television or a bed for a nap. My sister, mom and I loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed the remainder of the pots, leaving the stickiest ones to soak for a while. I was exhausted. Not just because I’d been up at the crack of dawn squinting to read the directions on the enormous turkey, but because my little boy was so excited to be in the same house with his cousin (who lives three states away) that he kept coming in my room every hour of the previous night to ask, “Is it time to get up and play now?”I glanced at the newspaper with its jarringly bright Black Friday ads, and I imagined all of those folks out there who not only had completed their shopping but who were at this moment securing their full, fragrant trees to the tops of their cars and dropping their stacks of stamped and addressed (sometime in October) Christmas cards in the mail so that they’d arrive on our doormat tomorrow – glossy images of happy, clean, suntanned, well-dressed families grinning from ear to ear.
Yes, the thought crossed my mind: Christmas, already? I may have even groaned before building on the thought: Can someone just make this holiday carousel stop for a few days? Then I allowed myself to become completely overwhelmed as snapshots of Christmases past flashed before my eyes as if preloaded in a mental projector: me wandering frantically up and down the aisles of a superstore, me gazing in a midnight glaze into the glare of the computer screen as I search for just the right toy online, hoping against hope that it would arrive in time and that some mechanical engineer might descend from the sky to help us put it together.
Immediately, a pang hit my chest. Dreading Christmas? How had it come to that?
I exhaled.
I prayed.
And the Holy Spirit – as it always does – began the familiar work of realigning my heart.
It’s been said that familiarity breeds contempt. Or that we take our eye off the ball at Christmas and focus too much on the hubbub and our to-do lists than the actual meaning. And, I suppose, all of this can be true.
But if we take a moment and reflect during this preparation season, this Advent, then God will undoubtedly blindside us with the terrifying, beautiful truth: He has come and He will come again. Could there be a more stunning revelation? Could there be anything more worth celebrating? (And not in a crazy, consumer, Martha-Stewart/Norman-Rockwell-make-it-perfect-way, but in a genuine manner, a breaking-bread-together-and-expressing-our –love-for-our-Father-and-one-another way.)
I will close with the final words from the essay by J.B. Phillips titled “The Dangers of Advent”:
“We shall be celebrating no beautiful myth, no lovely piece of folklore, but a solemn fact. God has been here once historically, but, as millions will testify, he will come again with the same silence and the same devastating humility into any human heart ready to receive him.”
May all of our familiarity with the season, all of our fatigue, all of our racing and running this time of year be turned into awe as we prepare our hearts to receive the world’s ultimate gift.
A deep breath is often all it takes.
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