The Season of Hope

If it is anything, Christmas is the season of hope; and isn’t that the way it should be? Those of us who are parents can remember holding our newborn in our arms and thinking and dreaming about what would be in store for this little tyke in the years to come. Our hearts and minds were filled with nothing but hope. We only wanted the best for the baby and silently promised we would do whatever would be needed to make those hopes and dreams come true.

Whether those hopes and dreams came true or whether we fulfilled our promise to do our best to help make them so is, in truth, water over the dam. We cannot go back in time and undo or redo what we should or should not have done. What is is what is. If we had more than one child, the second child benefited from the mistakes we make with the first. The more practiced a parent we were, the better parent we became.

Much in the same way, albeit it in a very different way, every year we become new parents of the Christ Child. On Christmas we hold that Child in our hands, hold our faith in that Child in our hands, and hope and pray that the coming year and years will be filled with what faith in that Child means.

Unlike our own children’s lives whose lives will be very much in their control and not ours, (even as much at times as we wish they could be – for their own good and our peace of mind), we are in control of this Child’s life as it has bearing on our own personal lives. We make and live out the decisions our faith in this Child presents to us day in and day out. Each day we are to ask ourselves if what we are saying and thinking and doing reflect what faith in this Child truly means.

As it is with our own children, so it is with the Christ Child: we don’t simply rejoice in the birth, literally or figuratively hold the C/child in our hands, hope and pray for the best, then put the C/child down and walk away. Rather, we stay intimately involved and stay involved for the long run – or at least that is what we are supposed to be doing. We cannot or should not be an absentee parent of our own children any more than we should be an absentee parent to the Christ Child.

We teach our children by our very lives, by the example of our lives. They learn both good and bad, love and hate, selflessness and selfishness from us, their parents. In the same way, we teach our faith in the Christ Child by the way we live our lives – or at least that is what we are supposed to be doing. How well we do it or how poorly is a reflection of what Christmas truly means to us.

As we gather to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child once again this Christmas, may we be filled with hope, hope that the coming year will be better than this past, hope that dreams that were dashed because of our own sinfulness or that of others or simply because of circumstances beyond our control be fulfilled this year, hope that we will do our best to model our lives on the life of that Child grown to full stature, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That is my hope for you and for me. Merry Christmas.