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I used to long for the perfect Christmas. I envisioned starting at Thanksgiving with the tree and decorations followed by all manner of Norman Rockwell-ish activities. Baking, making snowmen, sledding, drinking hot chocolate next to the fire, Christmas songs over the stereo, etc. And each year I manage to accomplish at least one of these to some degree. But no Christmas has ever seemed to measure up to my (impossibly high) standards.

Until this year.

This year I decided to not just lower my expectations but abandon them altogether. Rather than looking for the perfect Christmas, I focused on why I celebrate the season. I focused on Christ and His birth and what it ultimately means for me. I thought more about what matters and less about my Hollywood-Dickens-Rockwell mashup of what Christmas should be.

The tree went up around the second week in December, we never did get the garland around the bannisters, and once again we didn’t get Christmas cards mailed out or lights on the outside of the house. I didn’t bake much, and I certainly didn’t sip hot chocolate by the fire (after all, we live in San Antonio and don’t really use our fireplace for much more than candles). I didn’t listen to a lot of Christmas music (other than the fabulous songs we sang during our Christmas program at church). And through it all, I realized something very important.

I was pretty much stress-free during the entire run-up to this night. Sure, I took some much-needed (and rare) vacation time. Sure, we cut back on gift-buying and giving. But mostly, I discovered that I’m finally learning what’s important at the holidays.

And tonight it all came home during the last Christmas Eve service at church. I went out on stage and looked down on the front row. And I saw my daughters. Sitting in the front row. Singing. All the words to the songs I figured they had been ignoring. Raising their hands in worship. Smiling. Together. With us in the sanctuary as we all celebrated the real reason for Christmas.

And my heart was so full I thought I would burst. I hope I can remember that feeling during the next week or so and into next year as I get upset about their messy rooms, their grades, their tendency to be less than courteous to us. I hope I can remember this night, the night I realized that they will both be okay and grow up to be the kind of people Annette and I have always longed for them to be. In love with Christ. Focused on what’s important.

In closing, I thought I’d share this picture that I have posted before:

That’s my sister, me (in the middle), and my brother along with my father. I’m guessing that my mother is taking the picture. I’m probably five or six, and a couple of the ornaments in this picture now hang from my tree. I love this picture because it’s really one of the few I have of me as a little kid with my father.

I hope when my daughters are my age that they look back and remember nights like this one. That their children bring as much joy to them as they have to me. And that they, too, remember anew why we celebrate.

Christmas is many things to me. But most importantly, it’s love. Love of family, love of friends, and, above all, the love God showed to us when He sent Jesus to the earth in human form.

Merry Christmas!

Last night, we had our final rehearsals for our Christmas presentation at Community Bible Church here in San Antonio.  It has been a lot of work to learn the music, but the end result has been worth it.  The choir loft was full, the orchestra was packed, and we had what seemed like hundreds of kids on risers.  Magnificent!

Please join us on December 13th or 14th for this presentation. Even if you don’t attend church or aren’t in the holiday spirit, I guarantee this event will give you comfort and joy. And it will surely give you hope. And perhaps that’s something that has been in short supply in your life.

Don’t miss it!

Found this over on Drawn!, a blog about illustrating and cartooning.  I’m lucky to get enough money on my kids’ lunch cards every month…

Lunchbag Art

I’m still catching up on my blog reading, and today I’m working through a month of Ragamuffin Soul.  And I found this:

Yeah, me too.

I am catching up on some blog reading that I’ve been putting off for several weeks.  Every year it seems that the rush toward the holidays gets busier and busier.  I’m not sure why, and perhaps it’s my own fault for overcommitting myself to work, church, and personal activities and projects.  I haven’t had a lot of “think” time recently, so today I took some time off to just read.

And this quote struck me:

“Instead of demanding that our culture act more Christ-like, let’s start demanding that of ourselves.”

As my elder daughter would say… “Um, yeah…”

The quote comes from a posting on Collide magazine’s blog entitled ‘Tis the Season by Scott McClellan.  The article talks about how we should act in the face of attacks on our belief in Christ and on Christmas.  And it stopped me cold.

I was brought up in the Southern Baptist church.  I loved the pastor, I loved my Sunday School teachers, and I loved Jesus enough to commit my life to him at age 11.  I learned what was “Christian” and what wasn’t.  I learned to run away from things that didn’t fit my belief system and, unfortunately, from people who didn’t fit my mold of what Christianity should be.  And yet I knew, as do all Christians, that Jesus hung out with the very people I was taught to avoid.

In later years, as the conservative Christian movement started to grow, I started believing that the battle was between me and non-believers.  Especially those non-believers who were stridently vocal about it (atheists, humanists, pagans, etc.).  It cost me some friendships, and I became much more like the narrow-minded rabidly conservative pack that I care to admit.  At the same time, I became much more conservative politically and in many ways typified the young Republican Christian that Ralph Reed came to represent.

Thankfully, God continued to love me even as I became more like Saul than Paul, more like the Pharisees than the disciples.  He continued to place people in my path that were different from me, both politically and socially, and yet who were just as committed to the Kingdom as I said I was.  He continued to bombard this good little Baptist boy with the message that “I gave my Son for everyone, not a select few, and certainly not just you.”

When we moved from the Dallas area to San Antonio almost five years ago, we visited a lot of churches (all of them Baptist naturally).  And I found a couple of churches where I could have been perfectly happy attending.  They were much like my previous churches, structured and conservative and staunchly Baptist.  And then we attended our current church, Community Bible Church, which immediately put my concept of organized religion into a tail-spin.  Yes, the place was full of people just like me.  Yes, it’s what I would call an upscale mega-church.  And yes, I’m sure that it has just as many flaws (maybe more) as the churches I left behind.

But in the midst of the mega-size and mega-choir and mega-everything, there was a realization that there were a lot of people there seeking Christ who were decidedly not like me.  And I discovered that I was attending church with a significant number of people who had never been in a church before.  And God was welcoming them and offering them the same salvation through His Son that I had received 30 years prior.  And my faith was renewed.

My life has changed inexorably because I finally got the message, that it’s first and foremost about love.  About God’s love for us, so huge and so incomprehensible that He came to us in human form to die on a cross, alone and in pain and suffering, so that we could be His forever.  And Jesus commanded us to love others just as we love ourselves.  Period. 

To love others even if they dressed differently or attended different schools or listened to different music or lived in different neighborhoods.  To love others if they read different books or watched different TV shows or had different skin color or voted for a different presidential candidate. 

To love others even if they didn’t believe in Christ.

And so I’ve begun to live this out as loud as possible.  I still have my moments where I judge and condemn and look askance at “those people”.  I still slip into old habits like flipping on conservative talk radio occasionally.  And I still struggle with how to embrace those who ridicule me for believing in God and salvation through his Son, Jesus Christ.

But I’m free.  And with that freedom comes the enormous responsibility that I have to love every single person I come in contact with just as much as I love my wife, my kids, my friends, and myself.  I have to show Christ’s love for me by loving those He loved, by helping those He helped, and by acting as He would act.  With compassion and forgiveness and humility.  And having a heart that is big enough and open enough to accept every single solitary person for exactly who they are.

And never forgetting that my hope is in the Lord.  That my salvation is in Christ.  That my future is secure not by what I think or do or own or consume or how I vote or dress.  But my future is secure because Jesus gave His life up so that I could have mine and so that I could be Him for others.

Christ demands everything from me.  How can I demand less from myself?