What Will You Treasure This Christmas?

As much as we try to make it so (and as much as we would sometimes like to pretend), the Christmas season is never just all candy canes and mistletoe. There is real life that gets smashed into the celebrating, the remembering, the family memory-making that leave us in a sticky mess of December days. Kids get sick. Deadlines come too early. Bad news travels fast. Family conflict tends to grow rather than dissipate and the expectations of what we hoped our holidays would be, create a tension in our spirit that very quickly leads to discontent. 

Have you been there? 

Stuck between the insta-worthy hope for your holiday and the real people you celebrate it with? 

Sometimes all we need is a little perspective, some healthy re-direction to get our hearts back on track. I’m sure you know the hashtag #firstworldproblems well and understand the tongue-in-cheek reference – the shift our “problems” take when compared to true suffering across the globe. We have so much. We are so very blessed. What could we possibly ever label as “wrong” with even the most simple celebration of Christmas here?

Still, we know people (or are people) for which the holidays are just downright awful. The ones in which we feel loss, and grieve deeply, and try desperately to grab hold of the joy we know is found in Jesus. Those are real holidays too. When Jesus reminds us that He came for us in the mess, to hold us up in the middle of the heartache, so we can inhale His peace and exhale something like hope.

Christmas, in all of it’s wonder (and the dysfunction we inevitably bring to it) will be different for every one of us. We come to our holiday tables with expectations and baggage, riches or lack-thereof, and we all meet the hope of the world just the same – on fallen knees at a rough-hewn manger. 

Like Joseph and the Shepherds. Like the Wise Men and Mary. 

Can you imagine yourself at the manger as one of the weary wanderers looking into the very eyes of our God-made-flesh? 

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live at that time of history, with those kinds of troubles?

 Have you ever sat still for a hot Christmas minute and tried to place yourself in Mary’s Galilean shoes (the only woman recorded at the birth of Jesus)?

What a different story we live in our 21st century American world. 

Luke’s Gospel is a great place for us to start peeling back the layers of history and culture to consider some of these questions. While he may not have just come out and said it, I think it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that much of his Nativity account came from the mouth and memory of Mary. 

By our standards, Mary was impossibly young to be betrothed as a wife and then saddled with what every person in her world would deem an illegitimate pregnancy – except Joseph (eventually and miraculously). What folks did with illegitimate pregnancies back then is not too far off from how they’re handled now – erased – with untold collateral damage. This would have been her end had the Lord not intervened.

But over every woman God could have chosen to birth His Son, He picked her. Little Mary from Nazareth, a girl many would have overlooked, but who stood tall as a woman after God’s heart. Somehow she understood that when He picked her He would also equip her and in the wake of that life-altering revelation from the angel she responded with quiet steadfast confidence.

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.”

Luke 1:38a

In a single moment, Mary laid down every hope and every dream for her future to accept what God wanted for her. Do not miss the strength in her posture of submission to the Lord. She is it’s very definition, possessing the kind of fearless courage in the face of incredible uncertainty that I wish I could even have a small measure of.

Nothing was easy for her. 

If you are familiar with the other Gospel accounts you would know that Joseph planned to divorce her. Her parents could have disowned her and her community would have stoned her. Joseph was assured of her story through an angelic visitation but no one else. Their marriage would have likely lived under a cloud of suspicion their entire lives. She had to move at an extremely inconvenient time of pregnancy, give birth in unsightly conditions with unlikely and inexperienced help, and flee to Egypt with a very young child. 

How often did she replay that initial angelic message in her mind?

Did she lean into it for strength to stay the course or did she wonder what she had gotten herself into? 

We’ll never know Mary’s thoughts and feelings outside of recorded Scripture, but we can lean into her story in Luke. Take note of what was divinely inspired to be included (and what was not) in her particular telling of Jesus’ birth:

• There is no confusion or conflict with Joseph. 
• There are no wealthy Wise Men, or child-massacre, or flight to Egypt. 
• There is the safety of family and the support of friendship through her relationship with Elizabeth and Zachariah.
• There is a pure and honest offering of worship. 
• There is the unwavering support of the man God chose for her and her babe. 
• There are outcast shepherds, and choirs of angels, and a little old man and woman prophesying over her babe in the Temple.

Perhaps she felt it best to tell Luke the things that were left out, from her perspective, in other Gospel accounts. Perhaps she had worked hard to remember the best about that time. What we do know is that these are the things Mary thought of when she remembered Jesus’ birth.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Luke 2:19

This is the story that she treasured. 

The good things she set her mind on. What she hoped we’d hear in the promises and provision of the Lord in the middle of history breaking change. And this very simple verse causes me to consider what things I am treasuring up in my heart. Perhaps it causes you to consider the same.

The Lord is writing a story of redemption in all of our lives. 

Are we aware of it, submitted to it? Do we see where He is moving, what He is transforming, how He is redeeming? Or are we focused on the struggle, the conflict, the loss? When we consider our lives over the past year, what are the points we will remember and tell moving forward? The people and events that have wounded us or the places that God has met us, and moved us, and made us more whole?

I am reminded of a story I heard in one of our homeschool books about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Someone had hurt her deeply years before and when she was reminded of the incident by a friend, she acted like it had never happened. The friend pressed, asking if she truly did not remember the offense. Clara replied, “No. I distinctly remember forgetting it.” (Bible.org)

As we celebrate Christmas with our friends and families and transition into the New Year, I hope we also make time for quiet, and reflection, and prayer. That we allow the Holy Spirit to do good work in our souls, weeding out what He will, tending what is ours to keep. That we consider what He would have us forget about this year, what He would have us remember, and what experiences, like Mary, we should treasure up in our heart. 

Lord God,

Thank you for the story that you are telling in us. Highlight those things that you want us to remember, the parts you hope we will treasure. God may we offer our lives up as worship to you. Jesus, open our eyes to see where you are moving, what you are doing, how you are redeeming the brokenness of our lives. Give us strength to submit to Your will, in Your time, in Your way and the courage to live fearlessly into our calling.