Bring Christmas into the New Year

During the Holiday season (Christmas, Hanukah, Eid al-Fitr, Three Kings, Kwanza), people have been focused on the Light of the World, gifts, merriment, children’s wishes, and favorite foods. The year of covid-19 Christmas changed our focus in many ways. While many people have had some sadness during the holidays for numerous reasons, 2020 gives the word “change” a whole new dimension! Since the early spring we’ve been wearing masks, social distancing, and unable to gather with groups of people, including family members and friends outside of our immediate homes. All of this to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and keep loved ones and strangers safe.

These two events parallel with one another very well. Christmas and covid-19 are about unexpected change – life threatening, mind moving, faith provoking, lifestyle change.

There is a huge advantage afforded to those who have taken this time of 2020’s intrusion to self-reflect and redirect. If you are a person who was not able to find the gift of Christmas among the turnarounds of covid-19, I believe that faith will help you find treasures in the midst of troubles. Without some of the usual traditions and none of the familiar gatherings, it has caused me to look more closely at the core of what celebrating the birth of Christ holds.

This birth came at a time when Israel was suffering and facing great distress. This birth was the promised prophesied Deliverer, King, and Savior sent by Father God to fulfill the needs of every human heart. However wonderful, He was not born in a royal palace, but in a little humble, obscure place. Most notable is the fact that Christ was born to parents who were unknown and unimportant. This is important because it tells me how this birth was to affect regular, ordinary, perhaps unnoticed people like me some 2,000 years later. 

Jesus was just the right gift to open during this long-lived pandemic! A gift to truly recognize and plan on for 2021. He is a gift of impartiality – available to all who will receive, Gentile or Jew, rich or poor. He is a gift of love – Father God’s plan of salvation because we cannot help ourselves. He is a gift of power and wisdom in our lives – Jesus can subdue the distractions, sin, and temptations that are not in God’s will for our lives; and God’s wisdom gave us eternal life through Christ.

Walking into 2021, please join me in taking these gifts of Christmas to heart and finding new direction, comfort, and determination for the New Year. We can fully rejoice today and move the baby Jesus into our lives as a man (human and deity) to our risen Savior. He was born into our world (earth) to take us to His world (Heaven) with Father God.

We can trust that:

• God is doing something in our lives today, often in the background out of our sight, but He is also up to something else.
• God knows more than you and I do, so we can be calm, find peace and rest, and receive the leading of His Spirit for our life.
• God is fully present in our normal everyday activities. He is not taken by surprise ever.
• When God’s work is invisible to us, we know that He is still working in ways we may not understand.

Bottom line, God is always in control, even when life seems out of control during a pandemic. Don’t forget that He frequently leads us by indirect means, as with Mary and Joseph in their first-born child. Mary accepted the inconvenience, stable birth, traveling by night, and being away from family because carrying the Savior of the world was worth something more. Let 2021 be a time for us to plant seeds of expectation, watered with the reign of faith over fear – so that our blossoms will be a bright light shining through any darkness that threatens our journey with the Lord.

Make it a Happy New Year!