Celebrating hope often makes us feel hopeless?
Christmastime is here! It is a time to light candles, bake cookies, put up trees, hang stockings, gather with family and find the perfect gifts for our loved ones.
However, I often wonder: In all our efforts to manufacture the “ideal” Christmas, do we too often leave out the Creator?
How is it that celebrating hope too often leaves us feeling hopeless? Let’s face it. Our lives are crazy. With all of the typical pressures of life like running kids to various activities, doing homework, cleaning the house, and managing a budget to meet the expectations associated with gift-giving, family gatherings and Christmas decorations, things can easily become overwhelming.
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The truth is that we can get so focused on the trappings of Christmas that we and our families can miss the meaning of the holiday. Christmas is good news because our Hope is here! We should not be feeling hopeless. If after Christmas, a child's takeaway is disappointment over a gift they didn’t get, or a cookie not baked or lights not strung, we as parents have missed the meaning of Christmas.
Christmas is about the fundamentals of Christianity.
- Faith: God came to earth that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
- Hope: God left His throne to come to live among us and die for us because He loved us so much that He would pay any cost to be with us and lead us back to God.
- Love: God gave us His own beloved Son in order to redeem the very beings who had turned their backs on Him. John 3:16 so aptly explains, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
- Peace: Because Jesus came, died, and defeated death, we can have peace with God. Psalm 46 says, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”
Do our kids see us captivated by God’s gift? Do they see a heart seeking to love, honor, and serve others? Are their hearts moved to give this Christmas season? Do our kids see parents at peace who are resting and relying in the fullness of joy in the Lord?
Boys in particular need to see faith in action in tangible ways: packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, volunteering to cook dinner for veterans, visiting a widow in the church, participating in Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program, telling the Christmas story around a campfire or singing carols at a senior living community are just a few of the many great ways for our boys to experience the heart of Christmas in ways far more transformative than rushing to the mall or ordering a gift online.
This is what we should be celebrating during the Christmas season! What are you seeking this Christmas? Are you caught up in gifts and trees and stockings and lights and trappings of a commercialized Christmas, or experiencing the faith, hope, love, and peace that only Christ offers this Christmas? Are you manufacturing wonder through store-bought trinkets, or are you caught up in the wonder of the incarnate creator who humbled Himself, laid aside His might and power and infinite glory, took on the disguise of a slave, and became like men to ransom men to Himself?
This Christmas, make your priority seeking Christ, aligning your life with Him, resting in His strength, offering yourself as a living sacrifice, overflowing in love to serve others and finding joy in the Lord. Our primary concern need not be creating Christmas for our kids but creating opportunities for our kids to experience the Creator. As Ephesians 2:10 says, "For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepares in advance for us to do."
Mark Hancock is the CEO of Trail Life USA, a Christian boys’ adventure and character development organization, with 30,000 members in 830-plus troops across all 50 states, and author of Let Boys be Boys, 5 Critical Needs of Boys, and Why Are We Sitting Here Until We Die?
