Something Perfect
Have you ever felt pressure to be perfect?
Christmas is coming and we need the perfect presents.
We want to make the house decor just perfect and we want to present the perfect meal.
The Christmas cards we choose must be perfect and we might even want to look perfect for our guests!
Some of my best or funniest Christmas memories have arrived when things were the opposite of perfect.
My husband accidentally grabbing the sugar container instead of the flour (they are in identical receptacles) to make our Christmas gravy was a funny one. Oh! I just remembered another gravy incident. I think we used water once that came from our pipes that had just been serviced and the gravy was so salty you couldn’t eat it. (Always great when you serve it to your guests first! ha ha)
That one year when our cat jumped into the tree and knocked it over and broke a third of the decorations.
Things like this viewed with a light hearted look can add to the Christmas story lore that gets repeated every year.
Or as much as we want things to be perfect , something truly awful happens. Someone dear to us dies.
Families start fighting so bitterly that they have trouble repairing the damage for years to come.
We only have to look to last year to remember a Christmas that was unlike any other. We couldn’t have any of our beloved family with us for the first year ever.
Even that made for a fun story though as our daughter, Emily, and her boyfriend, Geoff, sat on our back deck in forty below and visited us through our kitchen screen door so that we could ‘be together’ because of Covid keeping us apart. Terry rigged up moving blankets and an over hanging heater in the middle so they could be warmer in what we now call ‘the igloo’. We made it work and we got to see one of our children and her partner.
I think it’s time to focus on our perfect Saviour. Let’s constantly strive to be the best versions of ourselves to ‘be perfect like our Father in Heaven who is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48) but not beat ourselves up if we fall.
Because we will. Probably flat on our face many times. But God will walk beside us and be there to lift us up. Always.
Let’s enter this last week of Advent in our beautiful versions of brokenness and focus less on ourselves but on Him who arrives as a babe to give us hope . He who came to us knowing that he would be a sacrificial lamb so that we could someday attain perfection with him in Heaven.
And be at peace, friends.
Feeling encouraged? Perfect.