How Not to Cheapen Christmas
VIDEO:
We've spent decades cheapening Christmas. Whether that's stripping it as the "greatest story ever told," or diminishing it so that we can avoid being called to everything that it calls us to, or we've simply forgotten what greatness looks like so we don't appreciate it when we see it. However we've done it, we've cheapened Christmas, and that is nothing short of tragic. This brief video outlines four basic things we can do to begin to restore a privileged and sacred sense of Christmas.
Wiping Out Staleness
The New Year is an opportunity for reflection. We’ve set the calendar and flow of the year in such a manner that the New Year is parked at a place that affords us perspective. Nothing changes. We’ve been handed nothing new. But we can stop, catch our breaths, rub our eyes clear of the smudges that life smears across them, brush off the dust that’s caked on us from the long roads we walk, and simply look around. We have a chance to inventory and assess; to deliberately engage the reality of our lives, doggedly evaluate those realities, decisively execute strategies to change, and embrace an enthusiasm about the possibilities that these actions will bring to the New Year.
We can’t wipe the slate clean, but we can rewrite it. We won’t be handed any new resource and we won’t be leaving anything behind, but we can develop new resources and we can systemically eliminate things from our lives so that they’re eventually left behind. We can’t ignore things but we can change them. We can pretend that the New Year is something that it’s not, or we can persevere in learning from the past to change the future apen Christmas
12