The Sixth Before Christmas

 

     What happens after Christmas day? What will we do? What will happen when all the presents are opened, when the last guest has left? How will we live when the lights have been taken down, the wreaths packed away, the food consumed?

       My family has never put up lights outside the house, but a few years ago, we started hanging them inside. When Christmas time came around we strung them along the windows over picture frames, above the doorframes and across the hallways, all around the downstairs of our home. 

It brings on the coziest atmosphere when only these and the Christmas tree lights provide visibility while all outside is dark. On Rainy afternoons, on dark evenings, on dusky mornings, these lights comfort and brighten our home. We always took them down after new years until last year. My mother loved them so much that she didn't want to take them down.

       I was upset. It was our Christmas ritual being turned into something mundane. My reasoning was this: If we take them down after Christmas and live without them for the whole year, we will appreciate them more when we put them back up. 

Logical, right? And there are certain seasons, during which it can be good, I believe, to step away from something in order to appreciate it better. 

However, I was forgetting a crucial point: We were not meant to live in the dark.

For the new believer who comes to Christ out of a lifetime heretofore devoid of Christ, conversion is often a sudden jolt of beauty. He feels the weight lifted off his shoulders in a sudden pulsation of glory, but for those of us who were raised in the light, who basked in its warmth from the day we were born until the day, ten years later when we turned to Christ, even though we sinned, even though we were transgressors with inky hearts of our own, even though it was different once the Spirit of God actually dwelled within us, still, because He dwelled in those around us, there was no sudden passing from dark into light. It was gentle, and gradual like the soft unfolding of rose petals.

Often I wished for that thunder-clap conversion, until I realized that it would require years of living in darkness. That moment of sudden renewal is a gift to those who have spent years in the blackness of their and their companion's sin, but for those of us who did not receive this, He has given what is, perhaps, the greater gift of having the light all year round.

I can become so focused on the experience of the moment that I forget the essence of lasting joy. I can become so caught up in the exuberance of a sprint, that I forget about the effervescence of a marathon. From now on I will look at those Christmas lights strung up in my house not as something that was once a nice Christmas ritual, but as a reminder that, as the author of today's carol put it, the real work of Christmas happens all year around.