The Cradle & The Credit Card..

They both represent a Kingdom.

One is the Kingdom of money, commerce, retail, budgets, profit, finance, and consuming.

One is the Kingdom of service, sacrifice, love and giving.

As the shop gets busier, and I find life getting more manic by the day in the build up to Christmas, I wonder every year which Kingdom exactly we're representing. Something knaws at me deep inside year after year that this isn't the way to celebrate Jesus' birth. If you're a Jesus follower, Christmas has to be about Him and not what you're buying, but we get so, so caught up in it. Not just that, but I as a shop-worker am actively promoting the idea that Christmas is about buying presents for people, with the offers I put on, the special discounts I make, the scanning through budgets and forecasting I do.

I was listening yesterday to a Pastor who has decided that he and his church are not going mad this year; they're only buying presents for people they're close to, and they're buying presents that will encourage time spent with each other in community. The presents they buy wont encourage their kids to go off on their own for hours, but will be chosen thoughtfully and carefully, almost being aware that what they buy and give is because of what Jesus did in coming into this world.

They've covenanted with each other that they won't spend as much as last year, that none of them will go into debt to buy presents, and that the money they normally would have spent, and they will no doubt save this year, they are donating into a fund with four other churches in the area to go directly to building wells in Africa for people who need clean drinking water.

If I'm honest I love the build-up to Christmas as I'm an old romantic, I love the carols, the christmas songs, the cold nights, the candles, being with family, the whole shebang... But very little of it has to do with the birth of a middle-eastern refugee baby born two thousand years ago. Maybe that's because to celebrate all those things rather than the call this baby has on my life, the way he wants me to live now, is easier to ignore. Maybe Jesus and His call is too radical for me, maybe he asks too much, and it's easier to bury myself in lists of things to buy, to consume for myself and my little circle, rather than think of the God who had everything but became nothing for me.

I'm not trying to be a party pooper, or super spiritual, but really, seriously, think for a minute...

Did God come into our world so that we could spend stupid amounts of money once a year on ourselves and our family?

Surely He came to make a difference to people's lives, to give them that most precious of commodities that can't be bought: Hope.

So why don't I?

:-(