Christmas
Torn between the hype and the holy.
Signs up, lights lit, stores gearing up way too early.
8 pounds 7 ounce baby Jesus commercialized and pimped. My heart breaks.
I love getting gifts. I love giving gifts
I love the looks on the faces of my boys as they see the bounty of wrapped boxes on Christmas morning.
I even love them asking me every day in December, "can we open a gift today dad? Just one, I promise we won't ask any more????"
How many of us did that?
How much anticipation did we have for that Christmas morning?
The excitement generated might have been a social experiment created by the axis of commercial, Sears Roebuck and Coca-Cola, but here we are.
In this time, in this place, in this buy on-line age where I can get all my shopping done at 3 in the morning on a Sunday with a click of the mouse. Or I guess several clicks.
But the gift. The original gift.
Can you imagine if we didn't get that gift or if we didn't receive that gift?
That 8 pound 7 ounce baby Jesus. How blessed are we that God has given us this grace.
How "lucky" are we that God decided to give us this second or third or billionth chance.
I don't know if we are celebrating the gift that God gave us rightly.
I don't think we are really.
But how happy am I that God bid on that item on eBay (me) and when he put in the amount he was bidding there wasn't a limit. He bid [His Son].
I know I am mixing the sublime with the holy a bit here but he paid for me and my sins with his son.
Christmas traditions are definitely screwy right now. It's hard to remember if my Christmas traditions are mine, the Brady's or the Huxtables.
It doesn't really matter though I guess cus I am going to spend this Christmas.
Spend my money.
Spend my time.
Spend my energy on the right things and the wrong too maybe.
And I'll spend my generosity.
The first Christmas was God blessing the world with a gift
[life in Him more fully]
Christmas is still about that gift but this Christmas we get to bless as partners.
The irony is I'm going to have to use the hype and make it holy.
Even with my kids. Not cheesy or greedy but HOLY.
What other time [other than Halloween when everybody actually comes to my door asking me to bless them]
are the doors, the homes or the hands of the world so wide open ready to receive a gift?
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4 comments:
Thanks Eddie! I like your idea about making the "hype" holy. I went Christmas shopping on "black Friday," and the amount of people that got out of their warm beds to stand in line at 3am was astounding. It was sort of surreal. At just the first store I was at (and this was the same for all of the stores around me) there were about 700 people waiting in the bitter cold hoping to get the best deal on whatever gift they could find. I mean, people actually lost sleep and were willing to freeze to death in order to get their hands on the perfect gift. Once inside the store, people began to display their animal instincts and there was a feeding frenzy on the merchandise. All of this excitement was extruded forth by people, in the hopes of buying the greatest gift. Shouldn't these same people, who care about gifts so much, be waiting in line to get into church? Why are they willing to lose sleep and suffer in the cold for gifts, but not Jesus? What greater gift do we have than Jesus, yet nobody is waiting in line to get into his store. Eddie I love your blog! It is TRUTH! I have had similar thoughts this week. The ending to your blog was wonderful. We have to take advantage of the openness of people this month and use it for Gods purposes. Thanks for writing your blog!
We miss you April!
You need to come visit us!
Eddie.
Well said. You write in a way that makes me feel smarter, and stupider at the same time. I love your perspective and insight.
Eddie_is this tat on you yet, or jsut in the works?
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