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 a friend won a trivia contest because she knew the day and year Elvis Presley died, I asked how she recalled the exact date. She replied, “I remember because August 16, 1977, was the day I traded one king for another one—it’s the day I accepted Jesus!” Indeed, it is an important date for her to remember. I don’t know when my mother-in-law became a Christ follower but my father-in-law marked his acceptance of Jesus with his baptism at the age of 17 (in 1925). I only know this because my in-laws kept a certificate attesting to his baptism in their safe deposit box along their birth certificates, passports, voter registrations, social security cards, and marriage certificate.
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]
“Chocolate comes from cacao beans. Beans are vegetables. Salads are made of vegetables. Therefore, chocolate is a salad!” said the sign in the bakery. “I like their logic!” I thought. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight you probably know the loopholes used by dieters. Broken cookies have no calories because they fell out when the cookies broke, anything eaten with a diet soda is calorie-free, and food eaten off someone else’s plate doesn’t count because the original calories belong to them! Technically, anything licked off a spoon while preparing food isn’t eating; it’s cooking! Furthermore, if you’re eating with someone else, you’ve kept to your diet if the other person consumes more than you! As a once struggling dieter, I know all the excuses to justify over indulging. The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves and, unfortunately, most of them aren’t as silly as these.
After being asked, “How different would the world look if everyone got what they deserved?” I started wondering. Even as a child, I knew people didn’t get what they deserved. When I was ten, I watched on television as nine black students tried to enroll in an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas; they were blocked by the National Guard and an angry mob of 400 angry whites. Two years earlier, on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman. I grew up in Detroit and, while discrimination and segregation were more subtle than in the South, it existed. I lived in a large home with a big yard on a tree-lined street but any bus trip “downtown” told me that the people of color didn’t live in neighborhoods like mine. There may not have been “colored” drinking fountains or “white only” bathrooms but there was a six-foot high, one-foot wide, and half-mile long wall segregating one black community from a neighboring white one. Many other invisible and more impenetrable walls existed within our divided city.
Devotions of the Heart 