How to enjoy Christmas anyway

There are Christmases where nothing goes as planned. There are Christmases that fill up with busyness without you even knowing how, days and days of tasks that swallow you up so quickly you forget to prepare for Him. There are Christmases of sickness and it’s all you can do to get off the couch, much less lead your family into worship. There are lonely Christmases where you feel invisible and misunderstood and small. There are Christmases that don’t match up to the one in your head, Christmases where your house is a mess and your family is grumpy and you are trying to survive and that’s all.

There are Christmases when you wake up and the big day is two days away and you find yourself wondering what happened. And your heart is crying out for you to stop, come to Him, do what you should have done so long ago, but you wouldn’t, because coming to Him meant coming face to face with your failure. You wanted to bring Christ into your Christmas, but instead you ended up with a Christ-less mess.

And so, two days before His birthday, you stop. You admit defeat. You are too tired to try anymore.

You think about the Jesse Tree stories, the history you have been reading to your kids about all the times God rescued His children, reaching into their messes again and again, saying, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”—and all because He loved them too much not to.

And this is the meaning of Advent—coming. God coming down for us because we couldn’t reach up to Him. He was born right into a mess and held by a terrified teenage girl who had no idea what to do except cling tight to that Baby. And maybe she had worked hard to prepare for Him and had a little place of welcome all ready, a room all clean and tidy. And now here she was in a stable, giving birth in the dirt, and soon she would be running for her life to a foreign land, and that little room must have seemed like a faraway dream.

And that’s the whole point. We made a mess of things right from the very beginning, and from the very beginning He has been coming, coming, and all we have to do is let Him in. Sometimes—always?—that is the hardest thing to do. But He sends stars and angels and wise men from afar to remind us we are part of a bigger story.

And so, one day before the big day, you decide to stop trying so hard and just let Him into the mess. You decide to smile.  You sit at His feet awhile, and you marvel at the beauty of this story that keeps unfolding into all the messes, always.

He just keeps coming. All you have to do is let Him.