Our home is divested of its Christmas garments. (Deep breath out.)
Perhaps you haven’t made it past Christmas yet. You’ll get absolutely no judgement here.
For the first few years after having kids, I always tended to take a deep breath in January and looked around the house. It felt like a battlefield where I had distinctively lost. Oh look, there’s a pile of laundry next to our couch. Another man down. Medic. Send someone in to bury this pile of the plastic encasing from the kids’ latest toys. Don’t forget the toe tag. Christmas carnage.
I grew up with so much Christmas because we lived away from family members and it was the one time in the year to see many of them. So I didn’t quite know how to practice simplicity and relax my expectations until a few years into our marriage. It’s something I still struggle with fine-tuning every year.
But here’s the thing. Christmas in its basest form was simple. Profoundly simple, yes. The trappings and the (earthly) plannings and the decor didn’t quite match what we might have chosen had we had 364 days in a year to plan it. The humblest of surroundings with exceedingly humble participants. There was no pride or pretension. Just beautiful, holy simplicity. Perfection in the moment.
This year our oldest was memorizing G.K. Chesterton’s A Christmas Carol poem in the weeks leading up to Christmas. A line kept sticking out to me as he would work on it. And it’s stuck with me past Christmas and past all of the news blaring daily and past problems.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
The context is talking about the nativity, but I think that we are able to take that line into the context of sanctification, of incarnational living. The world around us is weary. (Aren’t we all some days?) But the point is that in the presence of Christ, “here is all alright.”
As we walk in this weary world, in this new year, it’s my goal to remember that everything is alright in Christ’s presence while walking with Him. Not alright in a momentary, light, superficial way. But deeply, abidingly alright. Christ has conquered death. He is the Victor, from babe to King of Kings. In His