Waiting with childlike anticipation

Welcome to the “most wonderful time of the year.”

OK, that sounds like the first line of the “secular” part of your church’s Christmas pageant. Or maybe the aphorism on the inside of the card you’ll receive from your next-door neighbor two houses ago.

But theologically, it’s (almost) true. Actually, Easter is the most wonderful day of the year. That’s when we celebrate the successful completion of the Christ child’s mission here on Earth. Still, Christmas runs a close second. And since millions more people observe Christmas than Easter, you can understand why singers, cardmakers and most everyone else confuses the relative merits of Christmas and Easter.

If you don’t watch out, this can become the most annoying time of the year: The push-push of incessant commercials. The house to decorate. A shopping list as long as Dasher’s hind leg. Saccharine versions of carols played over every PA system in North America. Big crowds, long lines and paucity of parking.

When will it all end? You know exactly when. In the meantime, we’ve got to wait.

This year, let’s wait as children for Christmas. You remember how you felt, full of anticipation and joy. During his ministry, Jesus said we’re to give ourselves up to childlike openness and longing for him: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). To be sure, children often focus more on Santa and gifts than the Savior and glory. But if we capture their unabashed eagerness and focus on experiencing the joy of that first Christmas, this season will transform our lives.

If we put our hearts into the task, we can recapture childlike gladness, longing and expectation. Start by making a list of how you will approach Christmas this year. Here’s mine:

• Celebrate Advent. Advent begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends Christmas Eve. Millions of Christians gather around wreaths with candles that symbolize the weekly themes of Advent—hope, peace, joy and love. Week by week, night by night, they read meditations, sing hymns of anticipation and light the candles.

Worshipping around an Advent wreath particularly helps children—not to mention their parents—focus on Jesus during the weeks leading up to Christmas. Those lovely devotions create memories that last a lifetime, too.

• Go AWOL in the battle over Christmas. Some Christians lose their religion when anyone says, “Happy Holidays.” They fume about people “highjacking Christ-mas.” Unfortunately, their wrath doesn’t do much except ruin everybody’s mood. And when it spills over into righteous indignation, it pushes people even further from Jesus, whose birth we wish them to celebrate.

• Revel in the crowds. Hard, huh? Crowds can drive folks nuts. But just remember, Jesus came to Earth for all those people. We celebrate Christmas because he loved them—and us—enough to take on human flesh to show us the depths of divine love.

• Practice random acts of kindness. More than any other time, people need the balm of grace during the Christmas season. We might express grand gestures of kindness, like working in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. But small acts touch lives, like leaving the “good” mall parking spots for others, holding a door for someone, greeting folks with a smile or asking store clerks how they’re doing. Small deeds; large difference.

• Give more than get. Many people suffer personal pain—loneliness and heartache—at Christmas. One definition of pain is “an acute awareness of self.” The antidote to that kind of pain is to turn attention toward others. Maybe that means purchasing gifts. But more likely, it means giving others what everyone needs—love, attention, compassion, concern, acceptance, forgiveness.

• Give to Jesus. He said the measure of how we treat him is how we treat “the least of these” in our world. Christmas-season gifts sustain ministries and mission work that span from the neighborhood to the far side of the globe. It’s Jesus’ birthday; let’s see if we can give him a gift at least as large as all our other gifts combined.

’Tis the season. Let’s make it wonderful.

Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.