“HEY! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!”

This quote from one of our family-favorite Christmas books brought me back to another Christmas that wasn’t so funny. I was striving to create a perfect experience for Christmas. Money was tight, but somehow we had creatively spent hard-earned dollars to be able to wrap gifts and place them under the tree. We RSVPed, “Yes, wouldn’t miss it!” to holiday events with friends, and drove countless miles so grandparents could babysit our littles. On the outside we looked like a ‘put-together’ family, but in reality we were exhausted, and were struggling to make life work. We were inexplicably striving for what the world valued and had put our faith on a comfortable repeat loop. We were in need of a Rescuer to re-awaken us to His purpose and plan for our lives. And little did we know that God would shake us from our stupor, and place us at the crossroads which would forever change us – maturing from milk-fed Christians to believers deeply trusting God’s upside-down and inside-out salvation plan.

It was that Christmas season when we decided we would take a leap of faith in 2011 and move away from all that was familiar to us – family, friends, suburbs – and move to the west coast, San Francisco, and become an urban family in a totally unfamiliar ecosystem. It was in this secular, liberal city where our faith would be tested, grown, and where we would set down deep roots.

Sometimes it’s the most unlikely of people and places that can turn you around and direct you to run into your Heavenly Father’s arms. It’s in the darkest places of life where you can appreciate the light of the stars.

‍This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. 1 John 1:5-7 NLT

It’s in SF where our family wrestled with the darkness of our own hearts toward others not like us. We were and are confronted on a daily basis with the evils of addiction, homelessness, and fear of the other. We have to ask God’s forgiveness for our priggish pride, expose our weak faith muscles, and learn to pray to strengthen our loving responses to darkness. What we’ve discovered is that when we honestly confront our weakness within God’s truth and light, we become stronger and more genuinely loving…not because of our own merit, but because of God’s grace.

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Send out your light and your truth;

    let them guide me.

Let them lead me to your holy mountain,

    to the place where you live.

There I will go to the altar of God,

    to God—the source of all my joy.

I will praise you with my harp,

    O God, my God! Psalm 43:3-4 NLT

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So how can we transform from being the judgy Pharisee to a caring Samaritan? Still working through that by the Lord’s mercy, but it starts with adopting some humility every day, recognizing that our Lord came to save us as a humble baby in a lowly stable.

I think one way we can all move past the surface-ness of the holidays and dig into the real message of Christmas is to acknowledge our faults and offer a posture of learning and growing.  Christmas isn’t about perfection, it’s about love entering the world in the form of a baby. In these dark days of December, we can make the effort to turn our eyes off ourselves, and focus on the light that God brought into the world as Immanuel, God with us. Focusing on His light makes it much easier to care about people who are different from us, perhaps needing something we can offer – patience, kindness, food, a smile, a prayer. 

If you’ve never read the book by Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I’d highly recommend it as a family read-aloud. It addresses what we’re wrestling with here, in the form of a hilarious story of a family of cigar-smoking, neglected kids teaching the local Christians the real meaning of Christmas. In December 2024, we hope to see the story on the silver-screen, thanks to Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen. I just hope that by next Christmas I’ve loved more, learned more, and adopted more humility, so when Gladys yells, “HEY! Unto you a child is born!” I’ll be laughing while appreciating the light this character and so many diverse others bring to the world.   

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Merry Christmas,

Annikki

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P.S. Looking for a fresh holiday read? Here’s some of our family’s favorites:
Keeping Holiday by Starr Meade

The Best Christmas by Lee Kingman

The Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson

The Promise and The Light by Katy Morgan (reading this year and enjoying it!)

Waiting for Christmas by Kathleen Long Bostrom

The Bearer of Gifts by Kenneth Steven

The Coming of the King by Norman Vincent Peale

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December Epic Kids Memory Verse