A Picture-Perfect New Year
Was your Christmas picture-perfect? Like the picture-perfect greeting cards of families in matching pajamas? Maybe yours WASN’T picture-perfect which meant the doors of comparison swung wide open and envy and disagreements flooded in.
It is easy for our attitudes to turn sour because picture-perfect isn’t what our lives look like. What is it about the Christmas season that can make our families more dysfunctional, more imperfect than any other time of year? What is the perfect family anyway?
Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are our model for the family, and, as far as I can tell, they did not have the perfect family or the perfect Christmas. Not by our standards, at least.
They had no money (at least not until the three kings showed up), No extended family around to help Mary give birth. No baby shower. No matching pajamas. Mary was a pregnant teenager on a donkey with a husband who failed to make hotel reservations ahead of time. And her baby? He was born into a total mess—and I am not even talking about his line of genealogy (which, by the way, includes prostitutes and murderers). It was a literal, laid “in a manger with no crib for a bed” mess!
And don’t even get me started on the smell of the animals she gave birth next to. If I were Mary, I would have looked around at my tiny mess of a family and thought, “Really, God? This is what I get for being obedient?”
It was far from perfect. And yet, it was God’s perfect plan. Sunday, tomorrow, not only are we celebrating the New Year, it is also the Feast of the Holy Family. It is the HOLY Family; not the PERFECT Family. God isn’t looking for perfect families. What He desires are holy families. What makes a family holy? Families that surrender to the will and purpose of God.
In all of my family’s imperfection, I discover the path that God calls me to when I meet Him at the cross. It is not the path that leads to the perfect life I want, but the path that leads to the holy life that I need and desire.
If all we are looking at is what goes wrong, we are going to miss everything that God sets right. His lessons are always hidden in the most unusual and often painful details. He wastes nothing. He makes no mistakes. He knows perfectly well what He is doing.
As eager as we all are to hang up 2022 and press on ahead into better times, let us not be fooled into thinking that a new date on the calendar is going to magically change things.
I am more than certain that what I find imperfect on December 31st will still be imperfect on January 1st. If the new year is where we are placing our hope right now, might I suggest we spend some pondering time with Mary and dig a little deeper.
Because the new year is not what will change us. Holiness is. And so my prayer for all of us this new year is this. We quit trying to be the perfect family and make holiness our goal. How? We pray for our family. We pray with our family. We love our family – mess and all. Because the mess is not only why Jesus was born but where He chose to be born. The mess is where we meet Jesus.
See you tomorrow — imperfectly perfect, but with the PERFECT ONE Who holds our tomorrows in His mighty perfect hands.