O Holy Night

I'm a fan of Christmas songs, carols really. I can't get enough of them in December and am sad sitting here thinking about how we only get a handful of Sundays to sing them in church (because we're not crazy people who put up their lights at Halloween). Kidding. Kinda.

I'm also a fan of good listeners. And I try to be one, honest. But I have the same problem with it all- I hear something, get stuck on its significance and I can't move to the next phrase. Thus, I need a 7-seconds-back button for life like my tv remote gives me.

How does this all fit together, you ask? Welcome to my brain. But as I sung arguably my favorite carol on Sunday, I was so struck that I couldn't remember the rest of the words later that afternoon, only repeating this one line.

"'Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth."

You know the song, it's "O Holy Night."

Worth. Isn't that what we're all searching desperately to find? To be found special. To be found worthwhile, unique, worthy of love and respect. We search in our relationships, in our education, in our jobs, in our volunteer work, in our money and stuff. We search. We search harder. We do more, we get more. We search harder. We think just around this corner I'll find true happiness, true contentment and joy. This corner being a new relationship, a better job, a respectable amount of acquired stuff.

It won't. It'll never be enough. It'll never make you feel the feelings you're looking for. Maybe for a moment, perhaps quite a while without the spark of anything better. But it certainly won't last forever.

But if you're lucky enough, the Lord Jesus plants that spark. And your life of chasing what other people think and feeling inadequate doesn't evaporate but evolves. You see, Jesus shows us that our problem is not that our dreams and expectations are too high, it's that there too low.

When He appeared and the soul felt its worth. We aim for this unattainable earthly perfection in families, jobs, houses and various other things like clothes and electronics. And what God wants from us is to find our satisfaction in Him and put the measure of these wonderful things in perspective. To trust His plan in them. To feel the weight of His decisions of our worth.

We shrink ourselves down every time we try to find our worth in what other people think about us or in what we have. God wants so much more for us than what we're reaching for. Our value and worth are found in His plan and only in our surrender to it will we find that joy and peace we desperately seek.

And as the song rightly proclaims, "Long lay the world in sing and error pining, 'Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices."  And all we should do is, "Fall on our knees."

What an easily accessible God we have. Quick to love us and always willing to offer His view of us if we only ask. His view of our souls' infinite worth.

What's Important?

I'm plowing through the Gospels at the moment, feeling sometimes like I'm reading the same passage over and over- ha, because I am! But when God repeats things multiple times, like he does with the synoptic Gospels, it means we're supposed to pay special attention- sorta like you saying very, very.

So I've been thinking about Jesus going off alone to pray and how He constantly asked people He healed to not tell anyone- a true lesson in humility and priorities. Speaking of priorities, I read a few paragraphs just now so rich in importance that it's too good not to simply quote directly:

"Prayer is a kind of priority that lies at the root of all the others -- at the root of life itself. It's a lot like eating; if we rarely eat, our physical health will suffer. We'll be weak and sick. It will affect our ability to carry on the activities of life. In a similar way, if we rarely pray, our spiritual life will lack vitality. We'll approach the challenges and successes of life on our own, as though we're not totally dependent on God even for life itself.

"Without prayer, we begin to take credit for the good things in our lives, chalking them up to our skill, knowledge, wisdom and hard work. We begin to forget that all our skill, knowledge, wisdom and hard work are gifts from God -- He gave us the mind, body and circumstances of life that enabled us to have and develop those attitudes.

"On the other hand, without prayer, we fall into fear, anxious worry and even despair at the failures, frustrations and bad events in our lives. We become unsure of God's love for us, unsure that He stands with us in our problems. We feel alone and afraid, doubtful about our ability to cope with what life is heaping onto us.

"Prayer is the grease, we might say, that keeps the gears and wheels of life in good working order. Without prayer, we see ourselves as alone against the world, left to fend off the storms of life on our own wits and brawn. It is in the course of prayer that we learn to see the true state of things -- that we are creatures within a creation, creatures dependent on our Maker and on all the other parts of the creation, and as such, never alone."
-Excerpted from Grace Communion International -- gci.org/bible/mark1j