Today’s Reflection
Being Ready for Christmas

Many of us arrive at Christmas tired, distracted, and already fatigued with the lights, songs, and celebrations of Christmas. The days leading up to Christmas are rarely serene. When Christmas arrives, we are already tired of Christmas carols, having heard them already, non-stop, for weeks in our shopping malls, restaurants, and on our radio stations.

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that in our preparations for Christmas, we make very little space for the spiritual, for Christ to be born more deeply in our lives. Our time of preparation is generally more of a time to prepare our houses than a time to prepare our souls, more of a time of shopping than of prayer, and more of a time of already feasting than a time of fasting as a preparation for a feast.

Like the biblical innkeepers who had no room for Mary and Joseph at the first Christmas, we generally arrive at Christmas with “no room at the inn”, no space in our lives for a spiritual rebirth.  Our hearts are good, we want Christmas to renew us spiritually, but our lives are too pressured, too full of activity and tiredness, for us to have any real energy to make Christmas a special time of spiritual renewal for ourselves.
 
In the days leading up to Christmas, many of us struggle to do all the things we need to do to be ready for all that needs to happen in our houses, churches, and places of work.  Adding that on to the normal pressures within our lives, we’re left with the feeling: I’m not going to make it! I won’t be ready! I won’t be ready for Christmas!
 
But being ready for Christmas does not depend upon getting everything neatly checked off on our to-do list: gifts, done; cards, done; decorations, done; food, ready; the requisite number of social obligations, completed.

Even if that list is only half done, if you find yourself in church at Christmas, if you find yourself at table with your family on Christmas day, and if you find yourself greeting your neighbors and colleagues with a little more warmth, then it doesn’t matter if you are distracted, tired, over-fed, and not thinking explicitly about Jesus, you’ve made it.
 
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