Restoring Your Wonder This Christmas
“Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.”
Psalm 139:14
Christmas begins a week after Halloween at our home. We don’t decorate until December 1st but we have the “Christmas talk” the first weekend after Halloween.
The Christmas talk involves planning out the budget and all our hopes and dreams for the season.
And then I plan it out on the family calendar and begin to make lists. Lists for Christmas Eve food and Christmas Day food and Christmas break food. I make lists for stocking stuffers and gifts and the baking ingredients for baking I want to do. All with one desire - to make a meaningful and special Christmas season for my family.
The “Christmas talk” is supposed to bring order to a crazy season, instill a sense of peace, and spark a bit of joy for the upcoming celebrations. But this year, it did the exact opposite.
I started to feel a tightening in my chest every time I thought about Christmas. I had this unrelenting sense of dread about the coming season mixed with a sense of sadness that I was so despondent.
It was not so much the tasks but the responsibility I felt to personally fulfill everyone’s expectations for the season. I felt so much pressure to fill the season with wonder so that my children’s memories of these years would be sweet. I felt the burden to get just the right present for each child so that their Christmas would be magical.
After about two weeks of this pressure and feeling entirely unable to meet all the expectations and create all the wonder - I was praying. I was asking God to help me stand under the weight of this season.
God’s response to me was, as always, surprising,
He said, “You can’t. You can’t live up to their expectations and you were never meant to. You were never meant to be the wonder maker. I AM the wonder giver. I AM wonder.”
And what is true for me is true for you too. You were never meant to make the wonder and you were never meant to meet all the expectations. You were meant to receive the wonder that Jesus wants to give you.
Our plans and crafts do not make advent meaningful or wonderful. Jesus makes advent meaningful. The promises of God and the fulfillment of these promises in Jesus make it meaningful. God with us is meaningful, magical, and full of wonder.
It was always Jesus that made Christmas special.
But, I forget and maybe you do too.
Maybe you have lost your own wonder and belief in Jesus. Maybe you have grown tired of waiting in a broken world. Maybe you have grown weary of walking in the darkness and you do not see the light of Christ in your own life. The journey seems long and we forget.
Perhaps you have passed off the Christmas story as a thing of childhood or have stopped believing that it all really happened. That a poor teenage girl was asked to bear the Son of God.
But Jesus IS wonder. God’s offer is the resurrection of our hearts to His wonder, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit.
So, if we are not the wonder-makers, what are then to do during Advent and Christmas?
ASK:
Ask God to open your heart and the heart of your children and family to His wonder, to remind you of who He is, to dust off your heart and open you once again to the beauty of this season. Ask God to re-evangelize the parts of your heart that bear pain, that have lost faith, that have grown dark. His light is for every single one of us, those that have faith or had faith. Those that once believed and want to believe again.
Ask God to renew your sense of wonder and amazement at the arrival of the Christ child on earth.
MAKE SPACE:
Advent is traditionally a fast. It was a time to prepare your heart for the coming again of Jesus and Christians of old would fast for a month from particular foods or a full fast the four days before Christmas.
In North America we do not celebrate it that way. It is more a month of feasting. A month so full that there is hardly room for anything else.
But, what if during this month of December you asked God how you could intentionally make space for Him to fill your heart, mind, and soul with wonder?
That might mean fasting from something specific throughout advent or welcoming a new discipline in your life - giving, prayer, bible reading, contemplative meditation, service, journalling, painting, music creating, nature walking etc. God is faithful to fill the space we make for Him and God’s invitation to you would be that you would know Him better.
Rather than trying to create the wonder and meet the expectations this Christmas - give that back to Jesus and see what He might ask you to do. Allow yourself to be surprised and open to the leading of God this Advent season. See what wonder He might bestow upon you, what thing you might find yourself doing as a family. When you ask the God of Wonder to move in your life - you just never know what kind of wonder you will find.
But I can guarantee this - the wonder of God will always find you kneeling at the edge of a baby’s manger, gazing into the miracle of the Cosmic King made infant.