Limited-Edition Gifts
Christmas is a season. Once a year, it appears for but a short, magical time and then is gone again. And while most of us are aware of how fast Christmas comes and goes, I wonder how often we give thought to the changing seasons of life through which we experience it?
As children, we enter the holiday season purely as receivers, agonized with sleepless anticipation on Christmas Eve as we imagine the joys the next day will bring. Then, as we grow older, we discover the joy of becoming not only receivers but givers. We go on to have children of our own and experience Christmas from the perspective that our own parents had when we were young.
During this stage of life, some of the worshipful wonder of the Advent season can get lost amid all the frenetic end-of-year chaos. Many of us know all too well what it is like for December to blur by—dropping us on the doorstep of Christmas as another exhausted casualty of our consumeristic age.
And before we know it, January has rolled back around. The lights and tree come down. The earth laps the sun again and again as we ride the ebbs and flows of Christmas mornings with young children all the way into the teenage years. Then, one day, we wake into a new kind of December 25th. A new season of Christmases. No longer are we woken early by little hands and small voices, impatient with hope for the day to begin. The clutter and clamour that bear witness to the presence of young life have flown away to settle upon other homes until, perhaps, the young who bore our last name bear their own young into this world. And the words of Jesus’s little brother echo in our ears, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14).
How quickly does each December slip from the horizon into our rear-view mirror. How quickly are our previous futures remembered in photos. Why is it that time seems to drag its feet in seasons we would rather see behind us, yet moves like lightning when we try to hold on to moments that are supercharged with beauty?
Here’s why: time is unspeakably precious. Like the pile of presents under our trees, time is a gift. Every minute, day, month, and Christmas that God sends our way, is grace—unearned and undeserved. And the realization of this—sobering as it is—leaves us with one of two options. We will either resent the march of time and the changing of seasons, trying in futility to hold on to former days like one who tries to hold on to the wind. Or we will receive the changing of seasons, treasuring each one for the limited-edition gift that it is.
Limited-Edition Gifts
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). So said Solomon, the wisest man to live until Jesus walked the earth. What follows this statement in Ecclesiastes is a poem that simply describes the way that life is. Solomon lays out fourteen pairs of opposites—cycles of beginnings and endings that every human being will experience. There is “a time to be born, and a time to die” (v. 2); “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (v. 4); “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (v. 7)—and so on, with the eventual promise that God makes “everything beautiful in its time” (v. 11).
That’s the key. Every season of your life, including your present one, comes with limited-edition gifts that are beautiful in their appointed times. God has woven specific joys into each and every season that are unique to those seasons. And though we try, we cannot hoard these moments. We can only receive them like manna—gifts for the present—as we learn to say with the psalmist, “But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand” (Psalm 31:14-15).
God’s Faithful Presence to Us
So let me ask you: what season of life and parenting are you in—right here and now—that God wants you to be fully present to? Joy over the long haul is a lot less about finding balance and a lot more about knowing what season you are in and living accordingly. And so onward we stumble, knowing that while the seasons change, God does not (James 1:17). He is the Savior who “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). And rolling around each December, as our annual time-splitting reminder, is the truth that the God who does not waver has given us a gift that will sustain us through every season of our lives: himself.
That’s what we most need to remember this Christmas and each one after it: God gave himself as the gift. Jesus is Immanuel—“God with us” (Matthew 1:23).
Christmas is the message of God’s faithful presence to us. What powers our perseverance through the ever-changing circumstances of life is the never-changing nearness of God. In this season, God is with you. And the same is true for every future season ahead of you. If God himself inhabits every season of your life, then there is unimaginable joy and goodness and purpose and meaning and courage to be found in each of those seasons. Each is unrepeatable. Each is beautiful. Each is a limited-edition gift to be received, treasured, and trusted into the hands of him who makes everything beautiful in its time.
