Now What?

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and the princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among the people,

To make music in the heart.

-Howard Thurman

All done.  Candles lit, presents opened, family visited, mass quantities consumed, all the pretty things have found their place.  Oh, and now there's a baby to take care of.  Once upon a time, we had a little boy born exactly a week before Christmas, he was our first child and we had been waiting for him for a lot longer than a month.  For a couple of days we could just get lost in looking at his little pink toes and trying to figure out if he was smiling or just had gas, but eventually, right about this time, it dawned on us that babies are a lot of work.  Even when all they do is eat, sleep and poop, they are pretty much on a constant pattern of those three activities and suddenly, your life revolves around them as well.

Being fairly self-reflective people, Michele and I laughed a couple of times about how silly we were to have been so impatient for the child's arrival.  Perhaps our Advent preparations were naive in a similar fashion, this baby has some pretty hard implications.  He's going to grow up all too soon, and start telling us to put aside our greed and selfishness and start caring for others, even loving our enemies.  He's going to start pointing us towards a cross, which we are simply not allowed to ignore or avoid, at least not if we want to go where he goes.

Warm, fuzzy Christianity, about babies, shepherds and magi, is over, from here on out it's dirty diapers, and temper tantrums and puberty and driving lessons and paying for college.

Ok, maybe I'm being a little grim there, but the point is that following Jesus is actually rather more important, and more difficult, than simply "believing."  Belief is fine, but faith is a little more than believing that the story is true, it's putting your trust in the story, and that means trusting that all this crazy stuff happened for a reason.  

It's not just about assenting to the truth of the story, it is allowing the story to do something to you, and through you, and that, unfortunately, is where most of us fall down.

Did you manage to think about Jesus for a couple minutes during all the hooplah?

Congratulations, now he wants you to follow him.

Did you manage to "keep Christ in Christmas?"

Congratulations, feed his sheep, do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

Are you thankful and grateful for all God has done for you?

Congratulations, God wants to do the same sort of thing for everyone, and he wants to use your hands and feet, and words, get to it.