He continued, “Go home and prepare a feast, holiday food and drink; and share it with those who don’t have anything: This day is holy to God. Don’t feel bad. The joy of God is your strength!” [Nehemiah 8:10 (NLT)]
An old abbot was fond of saying, “The devil is always the most active on the highest feast days.” The supreme trick of Old Scratch is to have us so busy decorating, preparing food, practicing music and cleaning in preparation for the feast of Christmas that we actually miss the coming of Christ. Hurt feelings, anger, impatience, injured egos—the list of clouds that busyness creates to blind us to the birth can be long, but it is familiar to us all. [Edward Hays]
With just one week until Christmas, we may find ourselves sorely tempted to repeat Scrooge’s “Bah, humbug!” We’ve been busy with planning, cooking, baking, cleaning, decorating, shopping, wrapping, packing, and shipping; chances are that our expectations have become unrealistic and impossible to achieve. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in doing and getting that we forget the purpose of this wonderful holiday.
The word “holiday,” however, doesn’t come from “holler-day” as in holler at your family because you’re over-booked or over-drawn, nor does it come from “hollow-day” as in feeling drained and exhausted. A holiday is not supposed to be a “horrible-day” either! The word “holiday” comes from the Old English hāligdæg from hālig, meaning holy, and dæg, meaning day and originally referred only to special religious or holy days. But, because Christians didn’t normally work on holy days, hāligdæg/holiday became associated with time off from work and took on the new meaning of “a day when commoners were exempt from labor.” Nowadays, along with its original meaning, we think of a holiday as time off from work, a vacation, or a simply a day of rest and relaxation.
As we prepare for the upcoming holiday, we want to remember to keep the day “holy,” which means keeping Christ in our Christmas festivities. But what about that other meaning of the word holiday— a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done! As we busy ourselves preparing for the holy day, could it be time to take a brief holiday…to pause and do some refreshing and recreating while we reorder our priorities? Let us take time in the midst of our busy preparations to ponder the meaning of that baby’s arrival in Bethlehem so long ago.
What if we took a break from all the season’s busyness and truly listened to the beautiful music of the Christmas season? We could reflect on the joy that came into the world, think about those “tidings of comfort and joy,” and let them fill our hearts. Singing along with the carols, we could “pa rum pum pum pum” with the little drummer boy, sing long glorias with the angels, and let the hallelujahs and fa-la-la-la-las echo throughout the house. God doesn’t care if we can’t carry a tune; our praise will be music to His ears!
Chances are, hours have been spent hanging lights or decorating the house; have you paused to enjoy the decorations or think about what they represent? Notice the star on the top of your tree and imagine the magnificence of the star of Bethlehem. Take the time to look at your nativity scene and think about the people depicted in it.
Why not pause long enough to put your feet up and read some Christmas stories or poems? The first Christmas story is found in Luke but there are other mood lifters like The Gift of the Magi, The Littlest Angel, The Christmas Candle, and even Dr. Seuss’ wonderful tale about the Grinch! Take a break and watch a holiday movie, drink a cup of cocoa with marshmallows, sit quietly by the fire, or make a list of things for which you’re thankful instead of things you need to do.
Let us heed Nehemiah’s words in today’s verse and allow the joy of the Lord to be our strength as we pause to remember the purpose of all this holiday hubbub—the celebration of Christ’s birth. Both Isaiah and John told us to clear the way for the Lord. As we clear the way for our holiday guests, have we cleared the way for Christ’s presence in our hearts? May we never forget the reason for the season!
Father, as we busy ourselves with preparations to celebrate Christmas, keep our hearts and minds focused on the real meaning of this holiday—the loving gifts of salvation, forgiveness, and restoration brought to us by the Christ child.
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. [Dr. Seuss]
When writing about nitroglycerin recently, I realized there’s something else in our lives much like this strange chemical that is both helpful and harmful. Like nitroglycerin, man’s capabilities are a dichotomy between good and evil, constructive and destructive, and beneficial or detrimental. The same mind capable of creating a vaccine that saves thousands of lives is capable of creating a nuclear bomb that can take those lives. James speaks of this incongruity when writing about the way we use our words, “We use our tongues to praise our Lord and Father, but then we curse people, whom God made like himself. Praises and curses come from the same mouth! My brothers and sisters, this should not happen.” [3:9-10]
The early Christians often marked anniversaries of the martyrdom of Christ’s followers. By the fourth century, however, there’d been so many martyrs that there weren’t enough days to honor them all and the idea of one feast day honoring all the martyrs began. In 609, Pope Boniface IV established an All Saints’ Day in May. After Christianity came to Ireland, however, the Roman church attached the Feast of All Saints to the pagan holiday of Samhain (a celebration of the end of the harvest and precursor to Halloween). In 847, Pope Gregory IV formally rebranded this pagan Celtic festival as All Saints Day. Saturday, November 1, is All Saints’ Day and, regardless of your denomination, it remains a day to commemorate all of the saints, not as determined by any Pope, but as defined in the Bible.
It’s been nearly 50 years, but I’ll never forget that day when, out of anger and fear, I vowed, “I’ll never forgive him!” My husband and I had taken our three children shopping for school clothes. While I was busy with the eldest, my husband said he’d take the other two for a walk through the mall. Unknown to me, the three-year-old had convinced his father that he’d stay at the store, sit quietly in a little crawl-through hole by the store’s entrance, and wait for his dad’s return. Unfortunately, my husband never told me of that decision. Having the attention span of a gnat, the little guy quickly grew bored watching shoppers. After wandering into the store to hide in the clothes racks, he looked for his brother and me. Not seeing us (since we were in a changing room), the independent guy decided we’d left without him and calmly went looking for us in the mall parking lot. While I was paying for our purchases, my husband returned with only one child in tow. Almost simultaneously, with panic in our voices, we asked one another, “Where’s Scooter?” My imagination went wild with all the horrible things that could have happened to the youngster. In an instant, I decided I’d never forgive my husband for his carelessness and that our marriage would be over!
The two were seated next to us on the patio; the frail elderly woman was the mother and the younger woman her daughter. After pondering the menu, the mother had all sorts of questions about it. In no rush to order, she dithered over her entrée choice and, once food was served, she lingered over it. As I observed the two women, I could see and hear the daughter’s growing frustration and impatience with her mother. They reminded me of the times I took my mother-in-law out to lunch. Having “been there and done that,” I wanted to tell the daughter to be patient. One day, mom would be gone and she’d wish they had more days together.
Monday’s devotion (“No Words of Comfort”) originally was published back in 2018. It came to mind because my son-in-law recently died. His death was sudden and unexpected and, when my daughter told me, I was sure I’d misunderstood her words. Not Mike! Still a young man in the prime of his life; it couldn’t be, but it was! Just as we all know we’re going to die someday, we know the people we love will die. It’s just that we expect those deaths to be on our timeline. But they’re not—they’re on God’s. The only guarantee that comes with life on earth is that it will end!
Devotions of the Heart 