Deck The Halls...?! - More Like Deck The Customers!!!

Phew.

The weather is getting colder, the nights are drawing in, old ladies are hardly seen after 5 pm out on the streets, and a horrible dehumanising illness has gripped the general public, turning every man, woman, and child into a zombified, grasping, egotistical version of themselves...

That's right, it's nearly Christmas.

Speaking as a person who works in retail, I utterly utterly detest this time of year. It marks the greatest event this world has ever seen, the height and culmination of all of human history and longing, and it brings out the worst in us; the worst kind of selfishness and greed. I just don't get it. How can something so good be turned into something so bad?!

Before some of you say "ah he's talking about the blind unbelievers", actually I'm not.

The longer I work in a Christian Bookshop, the more I have to rely on God's strength and goodness to help me escape cynicism. Every year I see people who claim they follow God, and who I'm sure earlier in the week have been praising God, and yet using that same breath, use it to moan because somethings not exactly the way they want it to be, or the wrong colour, or not enough choice. In the same minute that a child is orphaned by Aids, or a single mother struggles to find food to feed her children, or a Pastor prays to God for the money to come from somewhere, anywhere so his village can have clean water for once; in that same moment, these people moan, and consume, consume, endlessly consuming.

Yeh I know I'm part of the problem, because I create the market and the demand for some of this stuff, part of which is, if I'm brutally honest, just kitsch disguised as Christian product.

And yet...

What i think of kitsch can be used to encourage someone, I know that, I've seen it happen. But something satill niggles at the back of my mind amidst all our back-slapping and egotistical self-encouragement. Are we missing something? Are we so comfortable with our lives that we've forgotten what it is to suffer? Are we so wrapped up in having "stuff" that we've forgotten who gave it us in the first place, and where it came from?!

The good news of the coming of Jesus I celebrate, I dance with joy at in my heart. My eyes well up when I realise that the Kingdom is now finally here, on earth, in Him. This festival of consumerism, this excuse to forget others, this small reason for hedonism doesn't match what i read in the Bible. This "christmas" I don't recognize at all anymore.

I know, I know I'm being harsh. But am I?

What does it mean for me, here and now in November 2007 that Jesus came? Does it change me, invigorate me, cause me to feel others pain, long to meet their needs, long to show them a God who loves them who lives in my flesh and bones?

I don't know, I just don't know.