Christmas is less than a week away. I have been doing my very best to embrace the season. The other day I said to my wife “Christmas feels different as an adult”. When I was a kid, Christmas was such a magical season. Time stood still. The weeks leading up to Christmas were filled with projects at school that involved snowmen, Santa, and elves. Our home was decorated with lights, the Christmas tree was picture perfect, and the smell of Christmas cookies filled the air. It was a very carefree time filled with wonder, joy, and presents. Then I became an adult and I picked up the “weight of life”.

The Christmas magic I loved as a child turned to responsibility (remembering to move the Elf on the Shelf, see below) and at times feels much more like work. Honestly, Christmas often just feels complicated. Seven years ago we moved to Wisconsin and discovered a tradition that we were not familiar with, Saint Nicks Day. This was not a “thing” when we lived in Colorado. As a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York there was no Saint Nicks Day. What I learned was that “St. Nick”, aka “Santa” came not only on December 24th but also at the beginning of December leaving small gifts for all the good children of Wisconsin. Apparently, Saint Nick did not get the memo that we moved and forgot to come our home. Our daughter Hannah who was 6 at the time went to school the next day and heard about all the gifts her classmates got, she came home in tears. Epic fail Saint Nick.

After Saint Nick finally figured things out we were visited by another Christmas figure, The Elf on the Shelf. He came uninvited and we found him in the most ridiculous of situations. He made life complicated (at least the mornings). The next year a second one showed up, one for each of the children of course. They have been coming every year and won’t go away.

Christmas is also a very busy season as a Pastor. At our church we do six Christmas Eve services over two days. I love it, but six is a lot…ok it is down right exhausting. I count down the hours because the day after Christmas we head to Florida to thaw out for a few days (as I write this it is -3). This year I choose to look at Christmas different and experience it in a fresh way. I want to again embrace the Christmas season with expectation and wonder. Each morning I have started my day listening to the old Christian classic “O Come O Come Emmanuel. As I listen to that tune, I think of the sacrifice God made to be with us. I am also reminded that “GOD NEVER FAILS.” That is one of the messages of Christmas. God delivers on his promises, he never fails.

 In the book of 1 John we find these words:

1 John 1:5 “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him, there is no darkness at all…”

In 1970 the theologian F.F. Bruce wrote: “As John writes these words he is saying God is the source and essence of holiness and righteousness, goodness, and truth; in Him there is nothing that is unholy or unrighteous, evil or false”. In other words, God never fails, but there is a rub. Sometimes there is a gap between what we want God to do and what he actually does. I think we have all experienced this. Have you ever felt like God has failed you?

About eleven years ago my wife and I were living with her parents. We had sold our home and were having a bigger one built but we had to be out of our old house before our new one was completed. The day before Thanksgiving my mother in law had a brain aneurysm and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. She had surgery and was in the hospital from November to March. In the month of March, due to complications, my mother in law passed from this life to the next at the age of 59. We felt like God had failed us. That thought was flawed, God never fails, but, our image, expectations, and assumptions of him often do fail.

We all have an “image” of God. What does God look like to you? How does he behave? You can use the same Bible as the person sitting next to you in church and walk away with two very different images of God, why do you think there are so many Christian denominations? We often confuse God with our assumptions about him. Sometimes we confuse God with an ideal image of ourself and when God doesn’t add up or do what we want we assume God has failed us. We also have an image of Christmas. In many ways culture has distorted the meaning of Christmas, the madness of Black Friday is one example of this. The moment a person is willing to punch someone in face to save one hundred bucks on a TV is the moment something has gone very wrong.

Life will get tough. I think we can all agree on that. However, we can not associate the difficulty of life with Gods character. When John writes “God is light and in him there is not darkness” that is a character statement. We have all had seasons in which we asked God to do something and he did not deliver like we thought he should and we, in turn, make a character statement about Him. We make assumptions that are not ours to make.

This week I challenge you to take a moment and consider the statement that God made when he sent his son to be born in the most humble of circumstances in one of the most diabolical times in history. Take a few moments this week and listen to the old song

Christmas is coming. As I sit in a booth at Panera, the old Christmas rhyme “Christmas is coming “is churning in my head: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat…”. This season is a time of goodwill, family, and feasting. The church calls this season Advent. In Christian theology, the word Advent means “the coming.” It is the time in which we prepare our hearts and minds for Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of Christ and the coming of the Messiah. This is a season of faith.

Right now battles lines are being drawn (again) around right thinking. Some have become so preoccupied defending “truth” and “belief” that they have lost sight of what the essence of faith is. Just spend a few minutes on Facebook or Twitter if you don’t believe me . Truth and belief are necessary; however, it is easy to reduce our belief in God to explaining God and completely miss the relationship defined as faith. Are we so arrogant that we think we have God all figured out? Have we made God into a set of bullet points or a technical set of assumptions that can be dissected and debated? God himself told us we could never truly understand his ways (see the book of Job).

Some have suggested that the word “belief” in the Bible is better understood as “trust” rather than intellectual thought or assumptions. We trust in a person, not a religious system. That is what faith is: trust. The working definition of faith is “complete trust or confidence in something or someone.” Trust feels more relational than all the other words we use to describe our pondering about God.

Advent, then, is a season of trust. I trust in the incarnation that Jesus came and lived among us. I trust that Jesus came because God is for me and not against me. I trust that God has my best intentions in mind even when I don’t understand them. In the Bible, the Pharisees missed this because they were concerned only with the details of the law and not with the person to whom the law pointed. They didn’t trust. Over the past couple of months, I have spent time with people who have walked through or are currently walking through terrible trials and suffering. In the midst of this, I have seen people who live with  trust that is not based on understanding and logic, but on faith. Many of the people I have spoken with are not asking “why,” but are saying, in the midst of their pain, “God, I trust you, much like Job said, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him…’ “(Job 13:15 KJV).

As we celebrate Advent, we don’t celebrate dogma or doctrine. We celebrate the coming of Jesus, the Messiah who asks us to trust in him even when we don’t fully understand his ways.