Listen for the Love!
‘Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’
Bobby - age 7
I stumbled across this quote online. It blew me away in it’s simplicity and honesty.
I guess we talk so much about getting back to the “real” meaning of Christmas, getting away from the commercialism, that it becomes a cliche. Leave it to a seven year old to boil it down to the basics.
That one sentence has made me step back a bit. That love the Bobby talks about? That’s Jesus. That’s his love in the room. It’s family, and the love that a family brings. And usually on Christmas all that love is shoved in the corner in the fight to open the next present. It becomes a feeding frenzy of wrapping paper, bows and ribbons. Children barely have time to glance at one present before they have tossed it aside and moved onto the next one.
It doesn’t seem to matter what the gift is, only what the NEXT gift is!
And it has to stop. It is so easy to fall into the trap. We want our kids to have it all. Guess what? They don’t need it all, they need us. And they need to learn a love of our Lord. They “need” to know the real reason behind Christmas and Easter, beyond Santa and bunny rabbits.
Don’t get me wrong… those things are fine in moderation. I have no problems with Santa, and we have already made our trip to visit Mr. Ho Ho… several times! But our children should know that Christmas wasn’t invented to get presents, that Santa isn’t the center of the holiday.
Oh, and we need to skip the stress, which showers from us down onto our kids. They see us sweating out the “perfect” gift, which only serves to dilute the season even more.
Yes, I know that this is the second blog I have written on this topic. There will probably be more, too. I’m having to convince myself to make shopping second and Jesus first. Horrible, isn’t it? Seems like a Christian writer should be able to fight off the urges to buy more more more.
It’s so easy to get caught in all the glitter. But 100 years from now, will it be more important what our children received for Christmas? Or what they received through Christ Jesus into their hearts?
Not really a tough choice, is it?
So throughout the Christmas season, stop and listen for the love. It will sound beautiful!
December 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Feel free to write even more on this topic I am sure that we are not the only woman out there that have that feeling on our hearts!