Vices and Virtues in the Coming Year

2018 is almost upon us. As the old year fades away, and the new year arrives, a lot of people set New Year's Resolutions.

I recently read Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott. In the book, Rose (the main character) challenges her cousins to give up one of their vices. She is challenged in turn to turn from one of her little vanities. This little exchange got me thinking as the new year approaches:

What vice in my life should I leave behind in 2017?
What virtue should I cultivate and add into my life in 2018?

If I cannot see the faults I possess or the virtues I lack, who is a trusted person in my life that I can ask for their honest opinions? Sometimes other people see these areas more clearly than I do because they are in my blind spot.

Even though I am a saved and sanctified Christian, I am still human and struggle to overcome my earthly nature. I can be petty, prideful, and a perfectionist. I know that I am not the reflection of Christ that I want to be. But I got to thinking: what if, each year, I give up a vice or idol that I realize is separating me from God? What if, each year, I make the effort to cultivate a virtue that Christ possesses, but I lack? Each year, little by little, day by day, I will be growing more Christ-like as I depend on His grace and mercy more and more.

In 2017, I plan to leave behind a few vices in my life: I will stop grumbling and complaining. I will release my hold on my possessions (aka stop being stingy).

In 2018, I plan to cultivate and add a few virtues: I will practice being empathetic and specifically nurture my empathy. I will practice generosity as a antidote to my natural tendency towards stinginess and greed.

I know there will be times in 2018 when I will grumble, complain, and be stingy. I know that at other times, I won't be empathetic or generous. These are not vices to conquer in a day or week, but as these deeply rooted habits and traits are attacked, they will weaken until it is easier to shrug off their hold on me. I am sowing these virtues in my life. Through watering the virtues, weeding out the vices, and taking the time to cultivate those things that are good and noble, these good traits will be strengthened in my life.

This is my plan for 2018. There will be hard days. There will be failures and mistakes, but I know that these desires will please God and His strength will give me the courage to get back up after failing and to try again after falling short.

Now it is your turn to ask yourselves these questions:
What vice in my life should I leave behind in 2017?
What virtue should I cultivate and add into my life in 2018?
Who is a trusted person in my life that I can ask for their honest opinion on my vices and virtues?

Examining Christmas Traditions

Christmas time is a time of tradition. We need to ask ourselves some questions:
Where do all of these traditions come from?
Why should we incorporate them?
Which traditions are secular and which traditions are sacred?
What traditions started off as sacred, but have become secular over time?

When we blindly accept traditions without examining them, our holidays start to get a little bulky. The meaningful can get buried and smothered in the louder and more prolific traditions. We let our lives and schedules become so over-full with good things that they push the best things off to the margins or out of the picture completely.

Following tradition for the sake of tradition is not the way to a meaningful and joyful life. Doing something because that's the way that it always has been done gets to be pretty exhausting.

Sometimes we need to clear off our proverbial traditions table and prayerfully examine which ones we should add back and faithfully incorporate. We need to ask them and God why they should be in our lives.

This beast of a Christmas season is overwhelming, chaotic, and going at an insane pace. I suggest that we, as Christians, perform a Christmas season reboot. Shut down the season. Then prayerfully and intentionally add back only those traditions that are meaningful and point us to Christ. Then we will finally find peace on earth in the prince of peace. Then we will have the space for the traditions that really matter.

Be warned, not everyone in our lives will appreciate that we are not following the popular culture's path. Some people will get upset that you are not jumping through all of society's hoops. Frankly, will we choose to obey God's instructions or will we follow man's traditions? We can't do both. We have to choose.

So let us interrogate all of our Christmas traditions and ask them how do they glorify and worship Christ. We may be left with fewer traditions, but they will point us and others to the true meaning of Christmas.

Below are some questions that we can use to start examining our traditions so we can set aside the merely good for the best traditions out there:

What do our decorations mean? (i.e. the candles, trees, tinsel, angels, Santa, stars, elves, nativity, reindeer, lights, and snowmen)
Should we incorporate Elf on the Shelf?
What messages do our seasonal songs send? (both the secular and the sacred)
Should we visit Santa in the mall or write him a letter?
Should we go caroling? Why or why not?
Should we go look at lights and decorations?
Should we attend a Christmas Eve service or a live nativity?
What's the point of baking all the Christmas goodies?
With whom should we share our baking?
Do we take the time to read the Christmas story & meditate on its truth?
What Christmas movies should we watch? (both the secular & sacred options)
Do we have an Advent calendar? What does it look like?
What would be a good meal for Christmas dinner? Who should be invited to share it with us?
Who should we give presents/gifts to? What should we give?
Should we use an Advent wreath and candles?
Should this season be one of hustle & bustle, or of quieter & simpler activities?
Should we send Christmas cards?

What other traditions do we have in this Christmas season? Should we keep them or set some aside?

Loving All This Christmas Season

During this Advent Season, we are looking at worshiping Christ, spending less, giving more, and loving all. These concepts come from a book called Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World? 

We are about to observe the final Sunday of Advent, before Christmas Day. Let's check in on how we are doing with the past few weeks' challenges from the Advent Conspiracy

How are you doing with worshiping Christ fully?

How are you doing with spending less?

How are you doing with giving more?

Now we are to the final theme: loving all. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy, right? Maybe, but then again maybe not.

We normally give gifts to those we know and love...or at least appreciate: family, friends, teachers, postal workers, pastors, etc. So we're acing this one, no changes needed!! But all is very inclusive. All includes the jerk who cut you off in traffic, the slow lady checking out at the grocery store, the friend who hurt your feelings, your enemy, and the people you'd rather not see & interact with.

We are fairly decent at loving those who we know and love, but this begs the question: What about those we don't know? I'm not talking about handing out gifts to random strangers on the street (although that might be interesting), but what do we do for the poor? The hungry? The sick? The prisoner? The orphan? The widow? The stranger? The refugee? Both in our country and around the world?

Matthew 25 spells out how Jesus identifies as these people and receives our service to them as if we served Christ Himself. So how can you serve Christ this Christmas as you love all around you and around the world?

Luke 14:12-14 records a challenge Jesus gave to a host of a party: don't invite those who will invite you back in turn, but rather invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind...those who can't repay you. Who can you invite to your Christmas celebration or dinner party? Is there a widow who needs an adoptive family? Is there a missionary kid who can be with their family at Christmas? International or college students who can't travel back home for the holidays? Who can you make room for at your table who may not be in a season of life where they can repay you?

What else can we do?

We can donate to a charity that empowers those on the fringes of society like Project Heifer.
We can support a fair trade business that employs those who struggle to make ends meet like 10,000 Villages.
We can open our homes and our hearts to the lonely around us.

There are people in the world in desperate need of love. The question is: Will we give unconditional love as freely as Christ gave it to us?

What other ways can you love all this Christmas season?

Giving More This Christmas Season

During this Advent Season, we are looking at worshiping Christ, spending less, giving more, and loving all. These concepts come from a book called Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?

So this week, we are looking at ways to give more during this Christmas season. Last week's topic and this week's topic are held in a holy tension together. How do we spend less, even as we give more? We are challenged to spend less in traditional stores on traditional presents, but we are challenged to give of ourselves to our family and friends.

I first thought that this book would call for us to spend less so that we could give more to charities and other good organizations, but the authors went in a different direction. They aren't discouraging us from giving gifts to family members and friends, but they are challenging us to give intentionally. Our gifts should give our presence, be personal, and be costly to us. Let's take some time to dissect what that means.

Presence: People do not necessarily want more things, but rather our presence. What are ways that we could intentionally carve out time to spend with and on our loved ones? What are activities that you could commit to doing with those you love?

Personal: There are so many gifts coming and going around this season, that we tend to forget what we gave and what we received. Can you name something you received last Christmas? What about something you gave? When we go to a big box store and start adding things to our carts that vaguely remind us of the people on our gift list, we are giving impersonal gifts. When we sit down and think about what we know of each person on our list: their likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, dreams, wants, and needs, then we are getting ideas for a personal gift.

Costly: I am not talking about a monetarily costly gift, but a personal costly gift. Anyone can go to a store & charge/buy a gift, but it is special & rare to give a gift from yourself that costs your time and energy. This is a risky gift, because not everyone will appreciate the value of this kind of a gift. What can you give to your family & friends that will charge your time or energy instead of your bank account?

So what are ways that you can give more this Christmas season? (Or maybe next Christmas season so you have time to prepare)

The Heart of the Matter

Do you ever read books that get the gears in your brain turning? I do love reading books that help me unwind and de-stress, but I also get some of my mental exercise by reading books that challenge the status quo and challenge the assumption that things have always been this way.

Most Advent seasons, I either re-read Christmas Is Not Your Birthday or The Advent Conspiracy. These are profound books that have changed how I view Christmas traditions and are important enough to me that I make sure to re-read at least one of them a year.

This year, as I have been slowly re-reading and reflecting on The Advent Conspiracy, I have been wrestling with the concept of what makes my Christmas celebration (as a Christian) different from a non-Christian's celebration.

I assist in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program and part of my job is to write summaries of important holidays and events in the United States. It typically is a pretty plain task, until we get into Christian holidays. I expected to end up with a list of "Christian" ways to celebrate these holidays and a separate list of "non-Christian" traditions for comparison. I ended up with a list of secular traditions for these holidays, but many Christians celebrate Christmas & Easter by doing many of the same things that non-Christians do, but with a Christian twist or with other a few more religious traditions added in. This went completely against my expectations.

This insight I had in the Christian/non-Christian holiday traditions helped me to catch a glimpse of the heart of the matter.

The lives of Christians should look and be radically different from a non-Christian's life and I mean radically different in a positive way. We should be a joyful, generous people driven by sharing the Good News with everyone our lives touch.

The Church is trying to reform what has become a frenzy of consumerism and spending at Christmas. Unfortunately, we try to do this by conforming to and mimicking the world's patterns, instead of letting our transformed lives speak of a better way to live. We are spending too much time, energy, and effort in an attempt to to add back Christian meaning to what has become secular traditions. Maybe we should give our culture the traditions they have claimed and instead allow ourselves to focus on celebrating Christ in a different way.

We are trying to focus on the sacred aspects of Christmas, but we are still attempting to do all the secular traditions that we associate with Christmas. We can't do it all. We are running ourselves ragged trying to do it all. The secular traditions end up crowding out the sacred ones. Maybe the Church needs to start doing Christmas in a way that is obviously, completely different from how the world does things. Then, the Church will be transformed once we stop trying to conform to the pattern of the world.

If "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" as our bumper stickers proudly proclaim, then perhaps everything we say, do, buy, and make for Christmas needs to justify itself in light of Christ.

To whom would Jesus have us give gifts?
What kinds of gifts would Jesus have us buy for others?
How much would Jesus want us to spend on presents we give our family & friends for His birthday?
What does Jesus want us to give Him for Christmas?
With whom would Jesus have us share our Christmas baking?
What attitudes would Jesus endorse in the shopping mall?
What traditions do we have that glorify Christ in this special season?
What traditions do we need to set aside because they are just about us and our comfort?

Radical? Yes.
Different? Yes.
Putting Christ at the center of everything each Christmas? Hopefully.

Being a Christian should mean that our lives are radically different from non-Christians' lives. We shouldn't be mostly identical, except for our Sunday morning and Wednesday night activities. Our Christmases should look more different than just adding in a Christmas Eve service and reading Luke 2 before diving into our pile of presents.

Is our Christmas radically different from a non-Christian's Christmas?
Are our lives radically different from a non-Christian's life?

What are we going to do to make it so we can answer yes to those questions?

Spending Less This Christmas Season

Last week, we looked at ways to worship Christ during this Christmas season. This week, I am looking at Spending Less. As a reminder, this series is based on the book the Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World? I highly recommend this book, by the way.

What was the best gift that you ever received from a person in your life?

How many of the gifts that you received last Christmas can you remember and name?
How many of them can you point to in your house as something you use, see, or love every month?

How many of the gifts that you gave last Christmas can you remember and name?

Where am I going with these questions?

Each year, we participate in the hustle, bustle, and rush of Christmas shopping, but most of us cannot recall what we gave and received last Christmas.

We buy things without a lot of thought towards who made it, what their lives & living conditions are like, and what the effect this gift giving frenzy has on the environment. We buy all these gifts because we are buying into our culture's lies that spending a lot of money is how we show each other that we love each other.

This is what Christmas has become, but it doesn't have to stay this way.

What if we took time, starting in January even, to prayerfully ask God what He would like us to give our family and friends?

What if we gave of ourselves and our abundance to show our love for our family and friends?
What if I gave my favorite blanket, our favorite tea, or a well-worn and beloved book instead of some trinket from a store?

Discipline. Self-Denial. Delayed Gratification. These used to be marks of spiritual discipline and signs of a growing faith. Now they are becoming marks of fanatics and enemies of capitalism.

We don't have to buy our child, grandchild, parent, relative, or friend everything that they ever wanted. We don't have to go into debt to provide the perfect Christmas experience.

When we choose to spend less on the frivolous or cheap trinkets that last only for a season, we have more money freed up to buy gifts in line with our faith.

We can buy one bar of rich fair trade chocolate instead of bags of cheap knock-offs.

We can buy one peace pin with a story of bomb casings being remade into doves to give as a gift instead of a variety of cheap, mass produced jewelry.

We don't even have to spend (a lot of) money to give meaningful gifts. Instead of quickly throwing a gift in a cart and crossing a name off of our lists, we can take the time to sit down, write a thoughtful letter about the impact the gift recipient had on our life, and then look for something we can make or give with our time. Commit to walk with a relative on sunny days. Make the effort to regularly call a grandparent instead of buying a "world's greatest grandparent" tie to hang in their closet. Bake bread for a friend and sit down to eat it with them, along with tea or coffee.

We say, "Money can't buy happiness." We say that we know kids need our presence more than our presents. But we need to start living this out in our daily lives.

What are ways that we can spend less this Christmas season and beyond to future Christmases?
What are ways that we can spend our time, words, possessions, and space with others this Christmas?

Worshiping Christ this Christmas Season

Mind your toes. This year, I'm re-reading a book called the Advent Conspiracy during this season. I am asking myself (and you, by extension) some tough questions.

Our initial reflex is to give the answers that we know should be true, but we don't always do what we should be doing. Instead, I challenge all of us to examine our lives, time, money, and space to see what our answer is. Once we have compared the reality of what is with the ideal of what should be, we can decide which one is the more godly path to walk on.

Now that Thanksgiving has passed for another year, it's time for Advent. The church may call this 4-week season leading up to Christmas "Advent", but we have forgotten how to celebrate it. It should be a season of anticipation, longing, and preparation. It is a time of frenzied activities as we shop more, buy more, and do more in a frantic attempt to find peace.

Who should we worship during the Advent and Christmas season?
The answer to this is clear: Jesus. The prince of peace. Emmanuel-God with us. The lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world.

Who or what do we really worship during the Advent and Christmas season?
We say that Jesus is the reason for the season, but how much do we think of Him, worship Him, or glorify Him during this season? We have set up idols in the Christmas season. We chase after the perfect holiday, following consumerism as we put presents and material possessions before Christ. Harsh but true. We try to do more things, but peace isn't found by following our culture's recipe. Peace is found by rejecting the pattern of the world, and instead following God's pattern. We may have to reject a lot of harmless traditions to have the room and time to follow God.

Based on how we spend our time, money, and space, what is the center or focus of our Christmas?
Honestly how is our Advent & Christmas different from a non-Christian's celebrations? Being a Christian should impact every area of our lives and our lives should look vastly different (in a way that draws people towards God) than a non-Christian's.

If we have the holiday of Christmas to celebrate Jesus' birth, then what gift(s) do we give Him?
The wise men gave Christ gifts on Christmas. There is no record of them giving gifts to their families or friends because of Christ's birth, but that's for a later discussion. Let's follow the wise men's lead and give Christ some gifts this year. His Word says that He loves the poor, the foreigner, those who have been pushed to the margins of society & ignored. He identifies with these people. When we feed the hungry, clothe the shivering, give water to the thirsty, and fight against injustice, we are giving Him a precious present. Maybe we could find a charity or a non-profit and give a gift in Jesus' honor.

If we cleared our calendars for December from all the optional (non-work & school) commitments, what acts of worship should we add into our newly freed space? What are special ways that we can worship God this Christmas season?

Why should we give each other Christmas presents?
A Christian book was written called "Christmas Is Not Your Birthday" There are a few exceptions to this title, when someone really does have a December 25th birthday, but our culture has convinced us that in order to "properly" celebrate Christmas, we need to show our friends and families how much we love them by spending large amounts of money on them. But Jesus told His disciples to invite those who can't repay the disciples to share meals with them. Don't just invite those who will invite you to a reciprocal party, but invite those who can't repay you with the same gift. Maybe instead of giving gifts to our circle of friends, we should give gifts to the homeless, the refugee, and the single mom.

So how would I suggest that we celebrate Christmas if we don't follow our popular culture's traditions?
*Christ-Centric (or as the Advent Conspiracy book says, by worshiping fully)
*Simply (or as the Advent Conspiracy book says, by spending less)
*Generously (or as the Advent Conspiracy book says, by giving more)
*Joyfully (or as the Advent Conspiracy book says, by loving all)

In the following weeks, I hope to look at what each of these would look like in our lives as we celebrate Christ during the Christmas season.