It is long overdue for a post, sorry. Life has been pretty crazy getting ready for the new year, and for the new addition to the family! Thanksgiving felt like just last week, how is it Christmas already??

This year, Priscilla and I wanted to do something different for Christmas. Since we already have so much, we decided not to give each other gifts. Not that we are against gifts, but we wanted to try to recapture at least a little bit of what Christmas is about by not making it all about us. After all, we are celebrating the birth of our Savior Jesus, who, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-7).

For Jesus, Christmas is about emptying Himself for the sake of others, ultimately dying for our sins. Obviously there is nothing we can do that can come even remotely close to that, but we wanted to take the time to bless someone else as Christ has blessed us. There’s a homeless man that I drive by almost daily on my way to work that God had been prompting me on more than one occasion to talk to, but I never mustered up the courage to obey. We decided to make a simple care package and share breakfast with him.

It was a really cool time just chatting with him and learning a part of his story as we ate some Jack-in-the-Box breakfast. He has been on the streets for three years ever since the factory he was working at shut down. We didn’t spend a long time together, but enough for me to realize that it is much easier to ignore someone in need when you don’t know anything about him.

I write this not to say we did some amazing thing; it really wasn’t much. It took a major Christian holiday to get me to do something Christians really should be doing on a regular basis. But I write this as a reminder to myself of how much more I still need to grow to love others as Christ loves.

Charles Spurgeon writes, “Immanuel-God with us in our nature, in our sorrow, in our daily work, in our punishment, in our death, and now with us, or rather we with Him, in resurrection, ascension, triumph, and Second Advent splendor” (Morning and Evening). Just as Christ left all the comforts of heaven and entered into our world to give us hope, we are called to step out of our comfort zones and enter into the lives of those around us to be God’s hands and feet to point to the living hope.

Merry Christ to all, and I pray this new year can challenge us and grow us to love as God loves.