The Holidays

I have a confession concerning the Holidays; I am a humbug. Now I fully admit that it's partly due to my flesh. Well, maybe more than partially. I am lazy by nature and all the cooking, decorating, buying the tree, untangling the lights, hitting your thumb on the hammer yet again, straightening the tree for the fifteenth time, chasing the cats off said tree, shopping for the wife and kids, wrapping the presents, cleaning up after each said event, ad nausea, really holds no excitement for a man whose idea of a good time is sitting in a comfortable chair with a good book. If physical exercise is required I want productivity; working out, tending to my garden. I want results for my efforts. Selfish, yes I know.

It also has to do with the flat out hypocrisy of the season. The thin veneer of pleasantness that people wear during the Holidays tires my spirit.  The same people that can barely stand each other and were fighting not but thirty days ago suddenly are in the same room kissing cheeks and cooing over unwanted gifts, most fighting again before the beginning of the new year.

Then there is the absolute crass commercialism that now dominates what use to be a special celebration for Christians. I am so sure Jesus came to die on the cross so that we could rush to stores on 'Black Friday', the day after my favorite Holiday, Thanksgiving (yes for the food but most importantly it is a time to give thanks), at an hour that farmers don't rise to, rushing stores for bargains that put us further in debt for things we don't need.

Bah! Humbug!

Can I challenge the Body of Christ (including myself) here for a moment ? Can we really celebrate the true meaning of Christmas this year? Can we put aside the things of the flesh for just a moment and look through the trees and the lights and somewhere in there find the real Spirit of Christmas?

Three shepherds over two thousand years ago did. Out minding their flocks one summer night (Jesus was not born on Christmas day, December 25th was the day picked to celebrate his birth, no one knows the real day he was born) suddenly,

And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: "Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!" Luke 2:9-14

We've heard this story so many times we've lost its impact. Good Tidings! Great JOY! The Angel didn't come to warn these men that God was going to flood the world like he did with Noah, he wasn't coming to warn them God was going to smite their cities because of their wickedness like he did with Lot,  he came to tell them that God had sent his only Son to make peace with man.

So this Holiday season can we make peace those around us? Not the peace of this world, but with the Love of God. Can we show love to those in our families and our lives who have harmed and hurt us? I'm not saying its going to be easy. For some of you (I'm in this boat), you can't even do it yourself. You will need the Holy Spirit to give you the strength and courage. We need to make peace with them, if possible, for God himself made peace with us.

I have a second challenge. Can we as the Body of Christ make this and upcoming Holiday Seasons less about shopping and more about giving? I know we say, 'it's better to give than to receive'; but do we really believe that? Does giving gifts to those that love us or to those who give gifts in return, is that really giving? Is that a true demonstration of God's love?

I know what my family and I are doing next year (I am embarrassed to say expectations are already set for this year but I am setting them for next year; family take note). Next year I am taking our Christmas budget and we are buying gifts for families that can't afford them and items the homeless need. We are going to wrap them and I am going to have my immediate family deliver them in person. We will then give the rest of the family Christmas cards that say something to the effect, 'Your present this year is you blessed this family with.....' and give them pictures and stories of how the gift we would have given them blessed someone else instead.

Giving gifts to those who cannot give anything in return. Radical? Not really. God did it for you. He gave you his Son so that you might live. And you what did you have to give to him? That's right. Nothing.

May you have a Happy Thanksgiving and a true Christmas of Good Tidings and Great JOY!

Hope

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." (1 Cor 13:13)


Paul penned these words around two thousand years ago and despite all of our technological, sociological and cultural advances they are still really the only things that remain important. Skeptics, particularly of the atheistic bent would scoff at this suggestion but I invite you to live without them. Most of us that have lived beyond our late thirties or early forties have probably tried and have found it difficult if not outright impossible to do so. 


Faith is a perfect example. Some will claim that there is no God; that everything around us is the product of pure chance and that indeed something came from nothing. The very fact that this belief is, in of itself, a statement of faith (there is no way to prove this scientifically or otherwise) seems to be somehow missed by those who hold to the idea. Everyone has a faith system for if one does not then there is no reason to continue and tragically there are some who come to this conclusion and end their existence. But it is not the loss of faith that causes this, it is the loss of that which is borne from faith and love; hope. 


Hope is the never discussed and much looked over attribute that is missing too much from the Christian's vocabulary and is desperately needed in our societies present economic and spiritual crisis. If Faith and Love were dating Hope is the unwanted third wheel in the church much like the Holy Spirit of the Trinity; seldom discussed, misunderstood, and underutilized. Which is a shame because it is rather quite powerful. 


A little over a year ago one of my business partners asked me to pray for the wife of a good friend who was stricken with a very aggressive form of cancer and he supplied me with a login to her Care Blog which she updates frequently for her friends and family. 


To say that Maria Elena Milam has been to hell and back is an understatement. She had her kidney and lymph nodes removed to find out that the cancer had spread to her spine and left lung. She went through exotic and painful radiation and chemotherapy treatments; some which she had to discontinue as the treatments turned out to be more dangerous than the cancer. She has been bounced around clinics, doctors, treatment centers, drugged, went through extremely dangerous back surgery (left a 12 inch scar), been down, back up and then down and then back up again, dealt with endless rounds of chemotherapy to joyfully discover it working on her cancer and then watch a good friend of hers die of the disease. 


How does one deal with life when it has become a personal living hell? This is what Maria has to say:

Hope really IS everything. With hope you can pick up the pieces and deal with whatever you are being dealt. There are times on this journey when I have lost it and when I found it again it was even more precious than before. This cancer journey has no rhyme or reason to it that is discernable to the human mind. But if you think about it, from strictly a human perspective there are many crazy things in life besides cancer that don't seem to make sense. I have been struggling with why some people live and some people die. The face of death is personal to me now as I have befriended people on this cancer path and those friends and aquaintences have died. There is Nancy from the center and June, Ron, and John from support groups. There is little Meena whose mother carries on with an unfathomable strength every single day. There is Laura from Inheritance of Hope. These are all people I met, got to know, and prayed for. They have moved on to the next life and they don't suffer here anymore but their families miss them terribly. And there are people that live like Billy from Virginia, Louie from New York, John from Gainesville, my wonderful friend and cancer mentor Kim, many, many people that now work at CTCA and Duke, and many people whose names I don't remember that were glowing from good news like the news that I got yesterday. There are people that I have lost track of so I don't know where they are in their fight and people fighting hard like Kristen and JayZ and Kelley. Where is the ryhme and the reason? I have come to peace with it by reminding myself every day that this is God's world and the only way to find peace with it is to find your way to God. I hope and pray that each of you can do that in your own way because it truly is the path to peace in this seemingly crazy world.

Hope is misunderstood as it has lost its spiritual connotation and context; we presently relate Hope with 'wishes', i.e. 'I hope I win the lottery', 'I hope I make a million bucks'. We associate Hope with things that we really never believe we will acquire or attain. Yet the hope of the Bible is a million miles from that definition. We cannot even have Faith without hope:

 'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' (Heb 11:1) 

Hope is not 'wishes and butterfly kisses', it is the real desire see the Kingdom of God established on Earth as it is in Heaven. It is born out of the Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; that even when we don't see it that in him all the promises of God are 'Yes' and 'Amen'. We Hope for substantial things and by our Faith we see them implemented in this dead dying world.


Jesus is our ultimate Hope. We know that one day we shall leave this body and someday we will see him yet again. But this is not wishful thinking, Jesus told us this would happen and we can believe him. Dead men tell no lies and neither does the one who came back from the dead. His resurrection is our Hope. Until that day Hope gives our Faith arms and legs and even sometimes wings. 


Until I started reading Maria's blog hope has not been one of my strong suits. So let's give it a shot shall we?


I hope Maria one day is completely cancer free. 
I hope that my marriage will continue to get stronger and stronger. 
I hope my children will come to know the Love of Jesus.
I hope my friend will find a job. 
I hope that Jesus will come soon. 
I hope that one moment of one second in heaven will wipe away all the suffering, pain and tears that every person has every experienced. 


I hope.