Preparing for Christmas

Christmas is just ONE week away! Are you ready? Have you finished your shopping? Put up all your decorations? Sent out all of your cards? 

How about your heart? Is your heart prepared for Christmas? To receive our Lord as we celebrate His birth? 

Let’s be real; the Christmas season is a busy time (to put it mildly) and can easily get the best of us. We become so caught up in the parties and to-do lists that the weeks leading up to Christmas often rush past us in a mad whirlwind. Yet the weeks of Advent are meant to be a time of interior reflection. It’s a time to ask ourselves, “Is there anything in my heart preventing Jesus from fully and comfortably dwelling there?” If there is (and spoiler alert, there’s always something), we can offer that thing up to the Lord and ask Him to help us overcome it.

In addition, spending even just a little quiet time with the Lord is a beautiful way to keep our focus on Him this Christmas, and it creates space for Him to speak to us and remind us of the miracle of His coming. Jesus came into this world in the stillness of the night — shouldn’t we receive Him into our hearts with that same peace and stillness? 

Yes, the enemy will try to steal our peace by keeping us pre-occupied with our mile-long to-do lists and thinking anxiously about the future because he knows that God only operates in the present (He is the great I AM), but no matter how hectic our schedules may feel this time of year, interior peace is always possible when we choose to live moment by moment in the grace and presence of God. 

Let's spend some time in stillness before Him this week and be reminded of the incredible gift of Jesus’ birth — both into the world and in our hearts.