'Tis the Season

The lights are glowing all around us now--dazzling displays in city squares, neighborhoods decked out with greenery and inflatable Santas, glittering malls swirling with holiday music to tantalize the crowds to celebrate with more and more, and even churches putting on gala events. Glitz is nearly everywhere. People will be scurrying around in this last week like the mice that dance with sugarplum fairies as we try to get our purchases made and lists completed. It is often a dizzying scene.



It makes it all the more challenging to remember the simple beginnings of the holiday. One tiny baby arriving in the night. Yes, God used lights too--of a wattage we could only dream of...a sky full of glorious angels telling us that the Light of the World had arrived. Talk about a spectacle. We've spun it into a production to be sure, but maybe it's because somewhere inside we know that even if we express it in a skewed and materialistic way, it is true that this event needs our attention, our energy, our time. Hopefully we won't miss the meaning while engaged in the madness.



Try to wrap your mind around the idea that the God who created the heavens and the earth would choose to inhabit the flesh He conceived, now Himself being conceived in the womb of a Jewish girl so He could come to set us free. Free. Now there is a word we don't here much in the days of December. Sure, there are bargains out there, but they are ones that often dig us deeper in debt.





He didn't come into the perfectly positioned scene we usually create in our calm-faced nativity sets....





He came into the chaos of a busy city where there wasn't even room for His mother to have a simple bed in which to give birth. He came to the cackles and noisy bleats where the animals were kept. He came right into the gritty reality of those who were over-tired and over-taxed. He came to us.


This year, as we are surrounded by the twinkling Christmas lights that pierce the darkness of winter nights, maybe we can remember the One whose presence pierces the darkness of our own hearts and souls and brings light to the very raw and earthy place where we need it most.


He never demands our attention or respect. He won't pencil Himself onto our holiday list. But perhaps we could stop for a few minutes to consider again the events that began this thing we call Christmas. It would be a sad (though common) thing to be caught up in the flurry for weeks and miss the point of it all.




Photographs: 200,000 Christmas lights, by terren in Virginia; Christmas Lights, by mandj98; B&W baby.JPG, by NataPics; A Rude Awakening, by "clarity"