I'll Be Home for Christmas

Christmas in the Northeast! The mystical powers of hot chocolate warming hands and hearts. Snow-flocked trees that stretch farther than aisle six of the local home improvement store. Carols and candlelight. Walk-thru light displays, drive-thru light displays, life-sized living nativities, and any other hyphenated holiday activity you can imagine. Quaint shops beckon givers in from the cold. Families gather, coats piled on a bed in the guest room. Memories of Christmases past. Every Christmas I have ever celebrated (save one) has been celebrated right here in the Northeast. Our home. Now that may not seem very adventurous to you; perhaps it isn't. But being home for Christmas, commemorating the season in ways that are familiar --and developing new traditions here and there --is, to me, one of the principal elements of Christmas. Before you get all Jesus is the reason for the season! on me, allow me to explain.

We've gotten to be a certain age, my husband and me. We have lost friends this year, and friends have lost spouses this year. We have friends right now who, for lack of a better euphemism, are facing the beginning of the end. It has weighed heavily on our hearts. But in that heaviness, God has spoken through His Word, through the words of others, that this is not our home. We are sojourners and pilgrims. We are servants of the Most High, given a commission, and retained here to complete it. We are to be in this world, not of it; to love our neighbors and pray for those in authority, much as the exiles in Babylon were commanded to do; and in so doing, to bring glory to God. In this season, we are reminded that our Savior, Jesus Christ, Himself being God, left His home and came to us. His very name, Immanuel, means God with us. God, in the body of a man, far from His heavenly home --one much better than the likes of this world --to be our representative, our example, our salvation. This world was not His home. Nor did it welcome Him (nor does it welcome Him today) with open arms. Being in our home, surrounded by our familiar "Christmas things," engaging in our Christmas traditions, sitting on the sofa shoulder-to-shoulder with family decked in pj's, reminds me that, as good as this is, Jesus left His home to give us something far better. Jesus was uncomfortable so that I could be comfortable; not here in this world --though I think I live far too comfortably, with roots far too deep --but in the Kingdom of God; for now, working to bring the joy and hope of heaven to Earth, but knowing this is not where my journey will end.

Matthew 18:2-5, records Jesus' words about childlike faith and humility. He spoke them, standing before His listeners, as a full-grown man, a God-Man who came to humanity as a newborn. He was fully aware of what it meant to be a child in their society: He condescended to be one. And my memories of Christmases past, childlike wonder, warm and fighting sleep in the backseat of my parents' sedan as we traveled from house to house on Christmas Eve; big bows on choir robes, and footie pajamas; tossing and turning until what seemed to be the wee-est hours of the morning in anticipation of what waited under a tinseled tree. Innocent and trusting. Home was wherever my parents were. This, too, is the point of Christmas, of this place not being our home. Though this may indeed be where we are most comfortable celebrating, though this may be what is most familiar, our home is where our Father is. Our home is not streets of gold or pearly gates any more than it is Luci snoring by a fireplace decked with balsam fir or festive stockings hanging low with the weight of generosity. Staying put right here in the Northeast --or wherever you hang your hat --in this place that I know as intimately as my own skin, awakens the knowledge that my Father knows me as no other, better than I know myself, and He is my true Home. This is just a backseat, this is just a choir loft, this is just a place I can lay my head and sip hot chocolate, a place I can be grateful for traditions and cozy December nights; but He is my Home. And where He is, there I will be also. Right here, in our home and in our hearts.