Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

With Thanksgiving behind us, the cultural season of Getting-Ready-For-Christmas is proceeding in wide open throttle.
People all around are planning and creating experiences with twinkly hues of colors, holiday aromas, delectable foods, joyful holiday music, and all the feels of loving and being loved by our family and friends that culminate on Christmas Day. This necessitates extraordinary time commitments to cleaning, decorating, beautifying, shopping, wrapping, baking, party hopping/hosting, attending holiday concerts or arts events, charitable giving, family photos, mailing cards and packages, meal planning, last-minute shopping, and gift exchanges. (Double that list if you have kids in the house.) Light some candles, attend a Christmas Eve service, and by Christmas evening, it’s all done. Whew! Your heart is full, and your tank is empty.
The Church offers a better way to prepare for Christmas: the season of Advent. There is no biblical mandate to observe Advent, but it serves to prepare us spiritually for Christmas. Juxtaposed with the cultural hustle and bustle is the idle speed of waiting and watching for God. In Advent, we relate to those who yearned desperately for their promised Messiah and expectantly await his promised return as our ruling King.
In full disclosure, I relish all the sensory aspects of the holidays, but if the weeks leading up to Christmas are spent only preparing to satisfy our physical and emotional comforts of the holiday, we have missed the gift of Advent completely. Perhaps we miss a blessing of healing or comfort or wisdom that only comes from being still with God for a season.
Christian friends, don’t let Christmas find you spiritually unprepared. It’s our religious holiday! It’s our story to share with all the world. Take time in Advent to prepare your heart, making room for Jesus to clean house and decorate for the holy days. This involves meditating on the bitter fact that you need a Savior, and that the person of Jesus was incarnated as a human (Christmas) to redeem you from sin’s curse and reconcile your relationship to the heavenly Father (Easter). In short, Good Friday could not have happened without Christmas Day. So, come let us adore him!
If you are unsure about how to observe Advent, welcome aboard the adventure of wondering and pondering the faithfulness of God. Any of your clergy are available to suggest resources and ideas, but the first step is deciding to feed your spirit with the gift of Jesus and to enter the season of preparation focused on him.

“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:11-13 NIV).