It’s five days til Christmas.  One Christmas movie has been watched.  Our Advent calendar sits, lagging chronically three days behind.  So does our Ann Voskamp Greatest Gift book.  We haven’t baked a single Christmas cookie or even thought about a gingerbread house.  We’re probably skipping the church light show.  The presents are just now bought, wrapped, and under the tree.  And I’ve barely played any Christmas music.  Pinterest and the competitive moms would say I’ve failed.  Some days it feels that way.

For my whole life it seems, Christmas has been my favorite holiday.  The lights.  The joy.  The wonder.  The gifts.  (Gift receiving is a love language.  Just ask Gary Chapman.)  But the past three Christmases I have learned the beauty of the struggle that surrounds the season.  That all isn’t merry and bright, but Jesus came to bring light and be light in a dark and lonely world.

But there is part of me that wants to skip it.  Just skip the season all together, like I want to skip January every year.  To just keep rolling along with school and business and life.  To not stop and see how perfect everything could be and realize just how imperfect and broken it really is.  Because the imperfect and broken just hurt.  And who wants to hurt during the most wonderful time of the year?

But this tension, this struggle, if we yield to them, they can open our eyes up even more to Jesus and the reason we celebrate the season at all.  We can lean hard into Him and lay all of our burdens down.  And He will meet us where we are and whisper truth and hope and good news.

And as I sit here, five days before Christmas, alone in my kitchen quiet, I can dwell on the darkness that has been the past seven weeks. I can focus on the lies that Satan speaks in the dark and the truth he doesn’t want us to see.  I can look at all the things undone, unsaid, forgotten, because when do we ever get it all right.  I can dwell on how my heart aches some days or how far away God can feel.  Or I can fix my eyes on the soft glow of the lights, the lights that twinkle hope and point us to the Light of the world.  I can fix my eyes on the tree that reminds me of the wood that made a manger where my Jesus was laid and that one day made a cross where my Jesus died.  I can fix my eyes on the beauty of the gifts all around me.  Not just the ones under the tree, but everywhere, the gifts that He never stops giving, if only we will open our eyes to see them.  And I can remember that just as a baby is not born without struggle, without pain, Christmas brings its own tension to draw us closer to the Jesus that we struggle to celebrate.

For His Glory ~