Christmas Looming                  

We are quickly approaching a season with two faces.   Christmas has the curious ability to bring out of us, or onto us, feelings of wonder, excitement, joy and an overall sense of “peace on earth, good will to men” (women).  

Then there is the other face of Christmas.  This profile is a bit more glooming as some people experience depression, despair and a sense of being overwhelmed by the secular side of the season: the hurried rush, yet another Christmas party, draining bank accounts in order to buy more gifts, and another black Friday with overcrowded stores.  

Which face represents your feelings as Christmas looms?

For me the word “looming” is a perfect predictive profile for the plurality of postures during the Christmas season. (Try saying that fast three times)  If you’re a glass half empty sort of person, it may mean an unwanted activity or moment that lay ahead in your journey, “ugh, not another Christmas crazy." 

If you’re a glass half full sort, it means sounds and sights, family and friends, chestnuts roasting on an open fire even though we don’t have them here in Florida?

The definition of loom, according to the dictionary, is noun meaning a mirage in which objects below the horizon seem to be raised above their true positions.  Maybe the glooming face many see at Christmas is, in a sense, just a mirage that has been elevated by markets and secularist above the true position – the inbreaking into the world of God himself.

The truth of Christmas is God loves us, and comes near to us, as one of us in Jesus.  In that truth also lay a mystery.  Because, there is something magically meaningful in Christmas.  It is undisputable.  

All it takes is a cold night and carols playing, or decorating you house with your family, or placing milk and cookies out for a long awaited midnight visitor.  Christmas for most, triggers a sense of unity, peace, joy and comfort which no other season does.  Christmas just feels different.

Christmas seem to interrupt our lives as if love is leaking out of heaven and falling like supernatural snowflakes.  For a moment we glimpse the extraordinariness of the Kingdom of God.

It’s like the music and the smells, the traditions and the love are signs of this mystery that weave into our lives creating an image of what God meant our lives to be.

So, I invite you to consider a different kind of image this Christmas this years – the image of the loom!   A loom is an apparatus for making thread or yarn into cloth by weaving strands together fashioning a whole.  By braiding in colored threads, you can actually create images.  

In the old days, one person sat at the loom and slowly and carefully wove the threads to craft the intended design.   

At first, you may not make out the image, so it’s bit of a mystery.  However, over a season, the image becomes clear.  In our case, the image of Christ in Christmas.  I hope your Advent journey comes alive in a new and refreshing way as we see and hear how these threads and cues of Christmas weave into our live to overcome the amnesia that the secular world imparts.  Remember, Christ too is looming