Advent 24 - Christ our Wellness
By Andrew Stewart-Darling
How have you arrived this Christmas Eve? Exhausted? Anxious? Unwell? Christmas can take it out of us, so why do it to ourselves?
I find the tasks around Christmas bump into each other much like fish in a small pond. My focus is scattered with the content of ceaseless, unaccountably endless thoughts. I flip and turn my way through the month of December, wanting to give my best attention to God while at the same time watching my body slowly empty of energy. But it shouldn’t be that way.
Advent is a journey of sacred interruptions to prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of Hope and yet each Christmas we can feel the tension between quiet listening and busy service, much like with Mary and Martha.
Jesus’ words to Martha seem particularly pertinent: ‘You are worried and upset about many things, but few are needed – or indeed only one’ (Lk 10:41).
The paradox of Christmas is that it asks everything from us, and nothing.
Yet the true work of Christmas started long before December with our Father in Heaven sending us his only son. A gift that doesn’t demand any hard work or effort from us but simply comes with an invitation to love Jesus with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Tomorrow, we welcome the birth of a homeless child into our homes, a child born into poverty so we may have everything. We might arrive tired but can embrace both Mary’s quiet reflective spirit and Martha’s practical service because we know ‘Immanuel’ is in both – and with us.
We will open our homes to family, friends, maybe even strangers, but our Christmas only becomes complete when we open it to Jesus. So, why not prepare now? Allow yourself to sit for a while and be well in his non-anxious presence, listening to the quiet voice that calmed the storm before you go on and do the next thing.
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As Howard Thurman’s poem reminds us, the work of Christmas has already begun: ‘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, and to make music in the heart’.
And as a grateful Scrooge says in Dicken’s famous story, ‘If Christmas Day doesn’t bring me a single thing, it will still give me a song to sing.’ Although I am secretly hoping for a new jumper too.
Life Interrupted
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