And going into the house they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Matthew 2:11
Ahh, Christmas! It is my favorite time of year! However, I notice that with this time of year we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to getting it right; the right decorations, the right Christmas outfit, the right gifts. But we really need to keep our focus right—on Jesus and not all the other distractions this season has to offer. And you know what? I find it really difficult to get things right some of the time let alone all of the time! Let me give you an example of what happened at the beginning of this season.
It is our tradition to go with our friends to pick out and cut a live Christmas tree. Every year we come home and put that tree in the front window where it looks really nice and can be seen from the road. However, we have a fireplace in our house and that is where we curl up and watch Christmas movies in front of the fire, but we cannot see our tree. So this year we decided to change that—we put up two trees. An artificial tree in the front window and the live one in the room with the fireplace. I had bought an unlit artificial tree because I wanted the flexibility to do either white or colored lights—plus it was A LOT cheaper than a pre-lit tree. The only problem with such an arrangement is that it necessitated that we also buy extra lights, ornaments, etc.
A week before I planned to decorate the artificial tree, I asked my husband to pick up white lights the next time he was at the store. Being the sweet guy that he is, he willingly did so. Unbeknownst to him, he grabbed white lights that were on a white wire which would not look good against the green tree. Off to the store we went but when we got there they only had LED white lights. I figured if that was all they had, those lights would be just fine, so we bought two boxes. When I plugged them in though, they were blindingly bright—as in we should place a sign warning of bright lights at the crest of the hill by our house. So we decided yet again to return these lights and go to a different store to get warm white lights. A few days later my husband picked up two boxes of the correct lights.
In the meantime, I pulled out the lights that we had used the year before for the real tree—a strand of those white lights had decided to stop working. So I added one more box of lights to my shopping list. Finally, armed with lights, I started to put them on the artificial tree, only to find out that it took many more lights than our real trees ever had and we were going to need yet one more box of lights.
If it felt at all painful to hear about the countless trips to the store, then you can only imagine how painful it was to make all these trips to the store to finally get our trees decorated! And that’s just the Christmas tree! I’m not even mentioning the gift giving and second guessing. Then there was the year I was happily distributing my homemade peanut brittle to friends and family only to realize that my candy thermometer had broken and there was quite possibly glass shards in all the peanut brittle I had been giving out!
Sometimes never getting it right is enough to make me want to throw in the towel—to not even try and to just say forget it! But, then I think about the wise men . . . they headed to Jerusalem, only to find out when they got there, that they needed to go to Bethlehem, so they headed to Bethlehem—not knowing exactly where to find the child, but they had faith and went. They took gifts that they were giving sincerely. And they left the rest up to God.
I think there is a lot we can learn from these wise men, especially if you happen to be a, well, micromanager as I have been accused of being on occasion! Rather than worrying about things that are out of our control, let’s just try to remember to bring our best to God, and to others, and then just let the rest of the worries go.
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