This Is How to Create the Perfect Christmas

I remember it well, not because I got what I wanted, but because I almost didn’t. I was seven, and the insistent wish in my head was for a Bible of my very own. A grown-up one, not the kid kind with colored pictures and large-print text. The thing is, I don’t think I said my wish out loud, at least not until it was too close to Christmas for my parents to do anything about it.

It was as real as opened in my mind. Somehow, I knew I was going to get a Bible that Christmas. But when the last gift under the tree was opened, I quietly followed my older sister upstairs to get ready for bed. My “I don’t understand, God” and “But I thought you said” sound a lot like they do today.

We get disappointment, don’t we? It sits on your chest like a lump of coal. Trudges muddy tracks across clean snow. Upends you like an emptied pocket.

It’s fewer around the table.

Less under the tree.

More stacked against you.

Ground crumbling beneath you.

A perfect Christmas seems impossible, but you’re holding your head up, trying your very best anyway. Because that’s what you do: you make the best of it. You’re strong, even when you don’t feel like it. You love big, like really big.

But maybe you’re so wrapped up in making Christmas feel right for everyone else, you’ve forgotten you actually don’t have to do anything to make Christmas perfect.

You actually don’t have to do anything to make Christmas perfect.

Christmas is For You, Not About You

I’ve made Christmas about holiday crafts, baked cookies, presents under the tree. Maybe you have too. We buy and decorate, craft and bake, and it all falls on us. But you were never meant to hold all that expectation in your two hands. You can’t make Christmas perfect no matter how hard you try because Christmas is for you, not about you.

It’s the gift God places right there in your tired hands: His wild, relentless love for you.

As Ann Voskamp says in her Advent devotional, The Greatest Gift,

The present is His presence, and the greatest present you always have to give is His presence—looking into someone’s eyes as you listen, refusing the wrong of rushing, lingering long enough to really listen—to everything.
pgs. 41-42

You might think you have nothing left to give, not enough to make it grand, no way of making the hole disappear—but you’ve got Him and an invitation in your hand to feast at His table and be enfolded in His great arms. He’ll overwhelm you with tenderness. Fill every crack and crevice until His love seeps through and runs all over the people around you.

You don’t have to create the perfect Christmas. You just have to give it away, because it’s already been gifted to you.

Giving Christmas Away

Isn’t that the honest truth? What God gifts isn’t meant for just us. What He shares with us is meant to be shared.

It’s John 17:13, just as true at Christmas as it is the rest of the year. Here’s what Jesus prayed before He faced the cross because love always holds His arms wide open for you:

But now I am returning to you so Father, I pray that they would experience and enter my joyous delight in you, so that it is fulfilled in them and overflows.
TPT

The God of all of heaven delighting in you. Let that sink in. He’s not too big to see you. Not too far away to catch the details that keep you tossing at night. Not too busy to read between the tired lines of what you say and what you don’t.

God’s not too far away to catch the details keeping you tossing at night.

He came for you because He can’t stop thinking about you. And when you know how great and wide and wonderful His love is, the smile in your eyes can’t be hidden. And He wants that for you.

This being loved so we can give love is pure and uncomplicated as a ripple effect.

Ann Voskamp says it this way,

He will bless you—the God of infinite reliability, the God who has infinite resources, the God who is insistent love. You can always go ahead and breathe—He will bless. You can always breathe when you know all is grace.

That is the order of grace . . .

The personal blessings envelop you first. Then you are the blessing sent to the world.

You will be experienced as a blessing—to the extent you have first experienced yourself as blessed.
pg. 40

Want to create the perfect Christmas? Open your hands and your heart to receive the gift of God Himself. Then give Him away. Say out loud how wonderful He is. Give the people right in front of you an intoxicating taste of the way God sees each of us. Gift your attention. Your time. Your presence.

A Perfect Christmas

That Christmas I was remembering—I didn’t tell you the end yet. After that moment I felt sad and forgotten, there was a rush of little steps up the stairs. My little sister, breathless, announcing there was one last gift we’d missed, and it was for me.

I already knew what it was. And I’m sure God smiled knowing how many times I’d tell the story of how much He loved me. Enough to care about a little request from a child. Enough to teach me to trust His voice, His timing, His nature. Enough to gift me the greatest gift of all: Himself.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, today we trade our broken expectations and piled-high disappointments for the gift of Your presence. We let go of what we want Christmas to look like and cling instead to You. You promise to fill us to overflowing so Your love spills out all around us. May we be willing.

Just a friend over here in your corner,

Missional Neighboring 101

This small book will help you make a big impact in your neighborhood as you learn to let missional living flow from the inside out. Download your FREE sneak peek today! Also, get the 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.