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| A shot of our backyard this morning |
Christmas is finally here. After a month of crazy schedules that were full of banquets, family, shopping, planning, and all the other things that come with every Christmas; its good to have made it to Christmas morning with our sanity still intact. It seems fitting that after all the hustle and bustle, Christmas morning comes to us this year as a quiet snowy morning with nothing on the agenda for the day accept enjoying the day.
We had our gift exchange with the kids last night. It occurs to me that there’s a certain level of anxiety that parents go through when they’re finding gifts for their children. We wonder if the gift is something that they’re going to enjoy. We hope that it will be built well enough to hold up at least until New Years. We wonder how the child will respond if they open their gift and experience more disappointment than excitement. Will they handle it with maturity and dignity or with selfishness and childishness?
We had put a lot of thought and effort into this year’s gifts and we were anticipating it about as much as the kids were. We wanted each one to be "The Perfect Gift" It turned out to not be “The Perfect Gift” for any of them. Every child had something in their gifts that didn’t work like it was supposed to or it was different than what they were hoping for. One gift was defective right out of the box.
The ironic thing, though, is that it bothered me more than it did my kids. I was proud of how they handled experiencing some disappointment in their Christmas gifts. They struggled with the line between honesty and complaining. Looking back, I think it was meant to be that way. I think it’s a part of healthy development to experience life’s disappointments. Disappointment is part of the human experience, and some handle it with more grace than others.
I wonder if God ever wishes that we would handle life’s disappointment with more grace than we do. He gave the greatest gift of all time when He gave us salvation and redemption through His Son. We could focus on His heart of love towards us, or the promise of heaven and absolute perfection someday. Instead we focus on the things in our lives that are not as we wish they were. We miss the perfect love of God, because of focusing on the imperfect experiences of life.
Here’s a quote from my 13 year old son. “If the love of God was all you had for Christmas; would it be enough?”
