So's Christmas . . .

The other day I was in a grocery store picking up a few things and I heard it, something I wasn't that interested in hearing yet, something that, when you hear it too early, inspires precisely the opposite sentiment intended. That it is Christmas music.

There's a saying: someone will say something is imminent, something's coming, and then someone else will say: "So's Christmas!" And it is. Christmas is coming. I can't stop it, but I can say that I wish it wasn't so quickly pushed on us.

Christmas is a mixed bag. In that bag there is both blessing and curse, good and bad, pleasure and pain, stress and peace. And, inevitably, each year when it approaches I experience mixed feelings. A part of me looks forward to time with family, giving and receiving gifts, seeing the look on my daughter's face when she opens presents. And then another part of me dreads the extra busyness, trips to insanely crowded stores, the swelled budget, and the emotions that go along with years of Christmas memories.

We can bring with us all kinds of unspoken and even unconscious expectations to holidays such as Christmas. Maybe especially Christmas. For years I had a picture in my head of an ideal Christmas. And each year that ideal picture was frustrated. Now, the ideal itself was questionable, to be sure, but I imagine that I'm not unique in having one. Usually there's the perfect Christmas we picture and there's the Christmas we actually experience.

Someone told me the other that the big problem with Christmas is that people get all worked up about how they want it to turn out, their expectations get all ramped up, and so inevitably they end up disappointed. I think that's true. And I think it's partly because people want Christmas to be special and to be the kind of experience that transcends the rest of life. So for example we hope against hope that at least for one day we won't argue with anyone in our family, that there will be "peace on earth." Or that there will be peace at least while someone is passing the potatoes and stuffing and until all the gifts are unwrapped.

Of course, there is nothing special about Christmas -- there's nothing magical about that date on the calendar. If you don't have peace in your heart already, you're not altogether likely to find it on that day. The holiday won't do the job of peace-making for us. Only he whose name is at the root of this holy-day can bring such peace. And the peace he longs to bring to each of us is something we need more than one day out of 365! To that extent, every day should be Christmas day.

So Christmas is coming. Yes it is. And since my wife and mother-in-law love Christmas, I've already begun to hear about it at home too. I guess what I don't like about hearing the music in the stores already is that the mood it hopes to invoke is a manufactured peace, a commercialized sense of hope and cheer. It's the way peace, love, joy, and hope are sold as sale items at WalMart.

When we think we can purchase what we need, we lose sight of the fact that with Christmas God began the transaction that gives us all we need. God purchased our peace through the incarnation -- the coming of God in the flesh -- and eventually through the blood of the cross. What we need, we cannot use a credit card to acquire. What God freely gives, we can never buy. There's never enough money in our account. Love became flesh and blood on that first Christmas. It is a love freely offered, freely given, to be freely received. So when someone says to you, "Christmas is coming," I hope that this comes to your mind more quickly than that shopping list you've drawn up.

Shhh . . . Again!

Today, sometime around mid-morning, the power went out in our neighbourhood. It doesn't happen very often and as usual it didn't last terribly long. But when it did go out, that meant the TV was off, we couldn't listen to the radio, there was no phone ringing, and even a couple of our appliances which were in mid-cycle stopped. We couldn't go online either. So for a short time we had to endure an imposed silence of sorts.

I didn't mind.

Lately, I've been feeling more stressed than usual. The pressures of ministry, home, and finances sometimes have a cumulative effect that ends up being more than the sum of their parts, and that's been true the last little while. And for me, if I'm already on edge or feeling irritable or stressed, noise can easily exacerbate my attitude. And by noise I mean any media. Sometimes my daughter, whom I love dearly, can make unwanted noise too. But, blessedly, during this brief respite from noise, she was with my wife reading stories. It allowed me to sit back and quietly read my Bible. There wasn't much else to do or much else I could do! It almost felt like God was telling me to sit down and shut up. And to sit down and shut up is not far from a description of what Sabbath ought partly to be about.

But quiet has to be self-imposed too. The power usually is there to make the appliances whir, the TV to distract, the laptop to hum, and the phone to ring. So effort is needed to find room for quiet in a world that far too often tempts us to fill every waking moment with noise. Even lately I've noticed a desire in me for more quiet, for more evenings of simply sitting with my Bible, a good book, or even a good magazine. My recent experiences of the sound of silence, however short-lived, have thoroughly reminded me of this. But the challenge I face is whether I will willingly allow silence to penetrate my otherwise noisy life.

All I know is that perhaps having quiet around me is related to having quiet inside of me, that allowing myself the experience of silence will hopefully promote a stillness of spirit, a space into which God can speak and be heard. And this is really the trickier part: stilling the noise on the inside of the heart and mind. Even if there is quiet all around, I can be all noise and distraction underneath. That's one of the reasons I suspect we surround ourselves with noise of whatever kind: to keep the restless sounds of our hearts from being heard. And I suspect that there are times when this may be more or less unconscious. We aren't always aware of our attempts at self-distraction; they become effortless and habitual. It doesn't take a whole lot of motivation to turn the TV on or surf the internet; deliberately placing ourselves in a position to listen to the stillness of God's voice requires discipline. That, unfortunately, is something many of us, pastors included, desperately lack. We fear what we may hear, perhaps?

But God desires to speak to us. Indeed, he has spoken to us ultimately in his Son, the Word. And he speaks to us in the words of Scripture, which tell of the Word. He is present when we pray. In fact, he is present even when we don't pray. He is always present to us; but we are not always present to him. And being present to God is all the more difficult when we allow the inferior "words" of everything else around us drown out the possibility of hearing his voice. Maybe what we need are more power outages!