The other day I began wondering if, in spite of many time-saving innovations, the lives of women today might actually be as complicated as the lives of women a century ago. For answers, I naturally turned to Google, the online rabbit hole for people like me who were born with too many curiosity genes.
After muddling through all kinds of lofty academic reports, this was my takeaway: Even though we humans keep inventing things to make life easier, we always seem to find ways to fill the gap and complicate our lives.
We may not have to haul our dirty laundry down to a creek and beat it on a rock, but we spend countless hours doing other things, like driving our kids to all their activities and responding to text messages, emails and phone calls. And because our standards for hygiene and cleanliness have risen over the years, studies show that most of us spend more time cleaning up ourselves and our houses than our ancestors did. Bathing once a month just doesn’t cut it anymore.
It seems we naturally drift toward complication, not simplicity, even when it comes to celebrating holidays. And that prompts me to ask the same question singer/songwriter John Lennon famously did: “And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Many of us would answer, “a lot,” even with Covid-induced cutbacks.
Has this Christmas season been a blurry flurry of busyness, or have you been able to steal some moments to simply ponder the thing we’re celebrating? I hope so, because what could be more glorious than the reality that God came, in person, to deliver us from the domain of darkness and transfer us into the kingdom of His Son (Colossians 1:13)?
Christmas is a celebration of the most magnificent rescue mission ever devised. Though we may complicate this incredible event, it wasn’t complicated for an all-powerful God who simply chose to come to us so we could come to Him. Jesus bridged the chasm sin had created and made a way for us to come home to our loving Father.
Play the Christmas story all the way to the end and this is what it looks like: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain … (Revelation 21).”
Quite the amazing future God has in store for those who accept His Son. I don’t want to be too busy or distracted today, or any day, to remember and rejoice in that.
On a January morning in 2007, a man played a violin in a busy subway station in Washington, D.C. He played six difficult Bach pieces as approximately 2,000 people walked through the station. Only six people stopped to listen for a minute.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played a violin worth $3.5 million dollars and just two days before this, he’d sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100. But in that busy subway station, he was ignored.
Someone infinitely greater than a world-class musician is trying to get our attention today, on Christmas. Let’s simply turn our hearts toward God, for He has reached down to offer us the blessings of His heaven.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy, He has given us new birth into a living hope… .” – 1 Peter 1:3