Monday, December 31, 2018
633 - Lighten Up
Spirituality Column #633
January 1, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Lighten Up
By Bob Walters
For a retired couple with no kids at home, we sure put up a
lot of Christmas lights.
Inside (Pam’s
job) are lighted trees, garlands, wreathes, and a lighted “Christmas village in
the clouds” (Kinkade ceramics, cotton batting, fake snow, figurines, little trees) atop
the living room book case. Outside (my
job), minilights outline the eaves, windows, shrubbery, and flower boxes along with
several more wreathes. We planted a blue
spruce tree in the back yard (it’s now 7 feet tall) specifically to hang
Christmas lights on (large and small bulbs, about a thousand all together – it
looks magnificent), and though we eschew Santas, snowmen, secular blow-ups, and
other Griswoldian excesses, we do station a couple of lighted deer in the small
woods behind the house for atmosphere.
With a fire
in the fireplace, it is all downright cozy.
But we could do more.
If we found
the right Crèche (manger scene) there’s a good spot for it near the front door. I keep thinking we should light the tree in
the front yard, but it is one of those awful crabapple trees that this time of
year still holds a smattering of shriveled leaves that won’t fall and gobs of
tiny fruit rotting on the branches. It
looks better in the dark.
We got a
late start decorating this year due to an atypical Thanksgiving out of town and
weather that wouldn’t cooperate. Plus,
the word has gotten around about Pam’s baking skills and she produced 1,200
cookies and 46 cake rolls for family, friends, and co-workers between
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Add in all
the normal Christmas gifting and wrapping and planning and eating with kids,
grandkids and dear friends and it was a huge build-up to a very blessed and busy
Yuletide for us.
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the
Year … and then it’s over. The
decorations are staying up until New Year’s Day since we got the late start but
normally they’d be down by now. By tomorrow
it will just look like January around here.
‘Show’s over.
In early December I was lamenting
to a neighbor about not having our Christmas lights up, and she gently chided
that Christmas “isn’t about the lights.”
Amen to that. Still, we regard our
lights as a neighborhood ministry – not to “light the way” for Santa to our
home, but for the light of Jesus to emanate from it. We hope our actions model Christian
neighborliness year round, but we hope the lights say, “We Do Jesus Here.”
A couple weeks ago I wrote about
God’s “thoughts and ways” being higher than ours (Dec. 17, CommonChristianity:
631 - Gettin' Paid), and how He miraculously does all He does in grace, not
in exchange for something. Humans,
generally, don’t think that way. We live
in a “lower” quid pro quo world with
our quid pro quo minds imagining a quid pro quo God, savior, and
religion. What’s higher about God’s
thoughts and ways is that God does it all with and for love … always. His unending light is Jesus Christ.
At Christmas, we revel in (endure?)
the holiday “build up” knowing shortly thereafter the cookies will be gone, the
lights will be packed, and it’ll look like January. But our lifelong, faithful build-up to the
real day of the Lord, the real reckoning, the real God, Spirit, and Heaven, is nothing
like the Christmas dynamic. After this
life’s build-up, that will be a
celebration with no let down, a life without end, and glory that doesn’t dim.
How does God do that? And what will it be like? I can’t imagine.
But it won’t be like January.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) and his wife love Christmas but don’t
exchange gifts.
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