More Christmas Pondering

We've made Christmas beautiful and busy. Not all bad, but not all good. The beautiful part is nice - warm memories, emotion-filled music, pretty decor, thoughtful gifts for/from special people. Like the history of many nice things, humanity steals the joy and adds excess until we are warped. This phenom is not just about Christmas. It is about nearly everything, including our ideas of what is right and good. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with how screwed up we all are in our thinking and acting - each of us in our unique way, of course.

As an example, Adam Hamilton writes (The Journey: A Season of Reflections, 2011):

When Matthew tells Jesus' genealogy he lists two prostitutes and an adulteress, women who were outsiders....

If tradition is correct, Mary's family lived in the cheapest form of affordable housing at that time: a cave. Mary's village was considered of 'no account.' But it was precisely here that God...

Even by today's standards, these examples not pretty, perfect, or glamorous. Why do we equate "the good life" with beauty, perfection, and comfort?

I love this nativity - it is rough and imperfect!

Why do we work so hard to be "happy," or to ensure our kids are happy? to be "successful," or to make our kids successful? If we believe anything about God, we believe he acts unexpectedly:

God routinely chooses the humble and the least expected in and through whom he might do his greatest work (Hamilton, 2011).

Shouldn't we be searching for God in the unexpected? Shouldn't we be acting in unexpected ways? Shouldn't we be considering ideas that are unconventional - whatever our particular convention of thought might be right now? Might not God use us in unexpected ways, if we look for Him in our discomfort, our imperfections, our ugliness - again whatever defines our discomfort, imperfections, and ugliness? I don't know about you, but my discomforts, imperfections, and ugliness vary, but they never completely leave me. My Christmas ponderings are leading me to embrace them, rather than avoid them.

Please God, help me to to embrace
Your ideas  with open-mindedness; 

release me from the ideas of this world
that paralyze me.