Christmas is about Christ’s humbling. Easter is about Christ’s glory.
I don’t know about you but I’m doing a terrible job of creating a humbling Christmas. I have been doing a great job of running around trying to get everything done. Feeling the drive to cross things off my list. Never mind that my list is full of all the wrong things.
Things are filling, overflowing, overwhelming my life. Things that will provide only seconds of pleasure to my children. God doesn’t want things on our list. He wants us to create experiential lessons to teach our children Christ’s love, sacrificial life and humble spirit even onto death.
Our children are watching what we spend our time, money and energy on. Do we attend Christ honoring events? What do we give to other people? What are we staying up late into the night doing?
I know what I’ve been doing, running around with my head cut off, spending too much time, energy and money on things that don’t matter. Going to sleep lamenting about my list and waking up in the same life draining way.
Lately I ditched the list and began to experience Christmas:
1) We are giving my children’s teachers a fruit tree for the (Impact Ministries International) orphanage in Honduras where our two orphans we sponsor live. Here is a picture of the teacher and children’s gifts each child gets a candy and a piece of paper explaining that their class donated a mango tree to orphans.
The paper reads: A mango tree was planted in a Honduras orphanage in the name of your child for Christmas. Somonauk Christian school’s preschool class manifested the fruits of the Holy Spirit this Christmas season.
The children demonstrated:
Kindness: Christ’s kindness by feeding others
Goodness: Christ’s goodness by giving good food to starving children
Love: Christ’s love by thinking of other’s before themselves
Faithfulness: Christ’s faithfulness by following His word. James 1:27(NIV)
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
2) We told the children the amount of money we were going to spend on them and gave them the option of getting all the money or giving it to their choice of charities. They could give or keep as much as they wanted. It felt amazing to hear them say $15 and realize that they meant keep $15 and give the rest away.
I still have to make two dozen cookies for every stinking event I go to but at least I’m getting some Christ back into my children’s Christmas. I think I’ll roast marshmallows over the fire created by my blazing to do list.
To Strengthen a Mother's Heart 