Is Your Christmas Too Full?

I feel you. And maybe try this.

Here’s the problem with Christmas: It’s a holiday about God arriving to fill our empty places, and we celebrate it by cramming our lives so full of crap that (in ironic alignment with the story) when Jesus shows up there isn’t any room in the inn or our planners or our hearts.

I feel it when I eat my fifth Christmas cookie of the day—a nativity camel. I feel it when I realize, wrapping presents, that one child has two less items than the other and instead of letting it be (I spent roughly the same amount of money on each girl), I head to Amazon for another couple items probably made by modern day slaves. I feel it when I realize I’m watching my second mindless Hallmark Christmas movie of the night. I don’t have little children any more but I used to feel it when I tried to cram memory-making into an hour or two after school, yelling at the kids to get in the car and stop fighting so we can drive around town looking at the same Christmas lights we did last year. (Did you know that in an effort to make Christmas special parents stay up past midnight an average of six times in the month of December? Most pull at least one all-nighter.¹) I feel it when the days are full of end-of-year work and the nights are full of events and it’s haaard to wake up a little early to pray for Christ to come.

But that’s what we’re doing this Advent—waking up thirty or forty minutes early, rolling into the living room yawning, plopping on the couch, and praying. We’re barely awake, we’re wrapped in blankets, but here we are.

It started because we are bad at Advent habits. We’ve tried ornaments and devotionals and calendars, but we never, ever finish. We lose the book. We leave the calendar at home while we’re traveling. The ornaments thing was boring. We never have the time at night we think we will…

This year, a day before Advent started, I made a suggestion: What if we just wake up early and pray? No accessories to lose. No book to order. No worries that something will pop up and displace our practice (we are not morning “goers” or “doers”). Let’s just carve out a spot, plant a flag, think about what it would look like for Jesus to come, and then ask Him to.

So that’s what we do. We each share one place/family/space/arena/sphere where we’d like to see God come in power, and then we pray that He would. Four prayers a morning. Each person prays. And after each prayer we say aloud, “Come Lord Jesus, Come.”

We’ve only slept in once so far, and in that case we prayed in the car on the way to church.

I don’t want to preach at you. I get it. I feel it. Modern life is exhausting—full of too many responsibilities and obligations and costs. I just want you to know: It’s nice to be with God. We’ve loved praying together in the mornings. We’ve loved remembering that with Jesus things might still turn around. And we’ve loved the way the day unfolds differently when we make space for meeting Yahweh.

God doesn’t want to be one more thing on your pile of have-to’s. He actually wants to help you slow down, do less, and make space. Space for what? NOT more space for more acts. Just space for Him. Space for hanging out. Space for getting to know one another. Space enough to dream about what might happen if He came. Space enough for Him to arrive and settle in and stay.

-JL

In case I don’t find my way back to Substack before Christmas, here are the Gerhardts doing Christmas-y things. We will not post pictures of the morning prayer sessions. We come as we are. ;)

Oh hey—the show!

If you’re interested, we still have a few tickets for the Nashville Holy Ghost Stories Christmas show on Tuesday, December 17th. I read the script today and bawled like a baby. So good. ALSO my daughter Eve wrote a song for the show, and it also made me cry. So I guess I’m saying bring tissues. But mostly I’m saying this show is beautiful, and if you come you’ll meet God. Grab some tickets HERE.

I almost forgot—I’m telling a story at the show this year, too. It’s a story about my family, enduring through super hard things, believing God’s promises, and the unexpected beginning of Holy Ghost Stories. Find me after the show and say hi! I love to say hi.

1. I read this on Instagram so I can’t confirm it’s true. But it feels true.