I once heard a person describe holidays as that time of year where we travel long distances and spend great amounts of money to be with people whom we have avoided all year long.
Of course none of us wants it to be that way. We all would love to be part of one of those remarkable families where everyone genuinely loves each other and enjoys being together.
We want our grown children to want to come home for Christmas; we want to be the kind of person who can both honor aging parents and inspire honor in our own children. We want our home to be filled with sounds of easy laughter, of comfortable banter, of heartfelt sentiments of love.
Yet, for so many of us, that is what is most missing every Christmas.
• The first, or second or tenth Christmas since the loss of a loved one will leave a howling hole without joy or light.
• An estrangement with a son or daughter will leave you spending the day wondering if the phone will ever ring.
• The tension of trying to hold together a crumbling marriage in front of the children at least through the New Year will take all the energy you have.
• Or the painful reality of so many blended families like I grew up in, where negotiating which parent gets the kids for which half of Christmas makes even the best moments tinged with sadness.
Or even worse.
I will never forget the Christmas night when the phone rang and one of my college students told me that she found her Dad face down in the kitchen. She said that at first she thought that Dad had just started his Yule-tide drunk a little earlier than usual. She figured that her Mom was going to be no use and her brother no-where-to-be found. So she prepared pour him into bed so that the family could start their usual, “Dad is sick on Christmas again” routine. But then she noticed a difference. Dad wasn’t passed out, he’d passed away. He wasn’t drunk, but dead. The addiction that had devastated their family had taken his life and, for my young friend, marred Christmas forever.
I certainly cannot claim that what write here today and tomorrow will be enough to take the tension out of your family Christmas festivities, if there is some obvious pain there, or bring enough comfort to you for the pain you might have, but what I can say is that God wants peace in your family. And what we celebrate at Christmas time is part of his plan to restore it.
The Old Testament ends with a prophecy of a prophet who will come to pave the way for the Redeemer. That prophet will come like Elijah with power and authority, Malachi tells us, and the sign that he is coming to make straight the way of the Lord, will be that “He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents…”
The good news includes God’s intention for heavenly peace, God’s peace, the peace of the Prince of Peace, to be present in our families and in our homes.
In both the prophecy about John the Baptist that we find closes the Old Testament, and Jesus own words in the New Testament, we find some guidance for restoring peace to our families and even better for protecting the peace that we do experience in our families.
What we learn from both the prophet Malachi and from Jesus’ own words is a hard principle that will take both trust and discipline:
We find the peace of God in our family by putting God’s priorities even before our family.
I know that for many of us, this seems harsh. Doesn’t God want my family to be my first priority in life? Shouldn’t family come before everything else?
No. Not everything else. Just most everything else. (Please know that I say this as a husband and father whose greatest joy in life is my family.) God’s own priorities teach us that when we make family the ultimate focus of our lives, we actually end up losing the peace we want for our families.
It’s like the way that people who focus their whole attention on happiness usually end up being very unhappy. Peace in the family is actually a by-product of two other even more important priorities. They are: God’s word and Christ’s call. (Which is what I will discuss tomorrow.)
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