Christmas Anticipation

The past few years I've had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. It's not something I consciously did, it just crept in, slowly stealing the joy from what used to be a favorite time of year.

I guess as I became more aware of a world that is broken and filled with hungry and oppressed people, it became harder to enjoy some of the exorbitance associated with Christmas. I started to become more and more against the materialism, secularization, santafication, tinsel, lights, movies, and general fakeness of a holiday that's supposed to be about Jesus. My attitude became "why give gifts we don't need and stuff our faces with food while other people starve?"

In all of the things I was against, I forgot what I was supposed to be for.

This year, I began to remember. And I was helped by being in churches, at an organization, and in a community that intentionally connected advent with anticipation for Jesus' coming. For once, I put some serious thought into what it means to anticipate Christ, both His birth and when He will come again to bring peace to earth.

And today was the end of that anticipation! And in some ways that I don't really understand, I've been able to really enjoy today as some small piece of what the coming of the kingdom is about. Gifts are a sign of love. Time together is about community. Feasting on delicious food is celebration. In that mysterious way that Christ is both here and not yet here, today there was joy and justice and wholeness and peace. And there will be, too.