Don’t Miss This Forgotten Christmas Gift

A few years ago, my husband and I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina and started attending Mecklenburg Community Church. It was there that we first heard about a concept that, frankly, I was a little embarrassed hadn’t occurred to us a long time ago.

The idea is simple enough: Most of us have some sort of Christmas shopping list; we just need to make sure we’re not forgetting the most important gift.

The Typical Christmas List

Humor me for a minute and think about your typical holiday list.

Whether it includes just a few immediate family members or extends to your mail carrier, grocery bagger and favorite dental hygienist, you likely spend some amount of money on gifts each year.

And then there are the charitable organizations, some of which rely almost exclusively on Christmastime and other end-of-year donations. From the local animal shelter to the United Way, everyone and their mother are vying for a piece of the holiday pie.

Starting on Thanksgiving Day (which some have dubbed Black Thursday due to the rise of the post-turkey shopping spree) to Black Friday to Small Business Saturday to Cyber Monday to Giving Tuesday, it’s out of control.

If you aren’t careful, you’ll wake up on Red Wednesday, which is immediately followed by Dig-Out-of-Debt December.

Missing the Most Important Gift

In all the chaos, we can find ourselves overlooking—or at the very least, skimping on—what should be the most important gift of the season: the one we give to Christ.

Now, I realize a Christmas gift for Jesus isn’t something you can put a bow on, place under the tree and expect Him to come pick up while He stops in for a glass of eggnog. But a gift for Jesus doesn’t have to be invisible and abstract, either.

My church simply calls it Giving to Christ at Christmas, and it’s a tangible way to support the causes closest to Jesus’s heart—like helping the poor, taking care of widows and orphans, and advancing His Kingdom through the Church.

The idea is that our first and best Christmas gift should go to Christ, and we strive to give generously—above and beyond our regular tithes—to show God we have our priorities straight. Our best gift goes to Him first, not to Best Buy, Wal-Mart or that nonprofit that does excellent work but not Kingdom work.

More Than an Afterthought

My husband and I have started to budget for Giving to Christ at Christmas each year, and we’re getting better at doing so before we make our annual holiday shopping list.

The amount is between us and God (and the church finance guy, I suppose), and it varies from year to year based on how much we are able to give. There’s no magic formula. We just try to make sure it reflects our priorities and, subsequently, the real heart of the Christmas season.

So this year, go ahead and make your Christmas list, and feel free to include your dental hygienist and that cool nonprofit. But put it all in the right order. Give to Christ first. It is His birthday, after all.

Don’t Fall into the Home Improvement Trap

Remember when the only home improvement show on prime time TV starred Tim Allen and had almost nothing to do with actual home repairs?

Now home improvement shows are everywhere—Extreme Home Makeover, Love It or List It and Curb Appeal are a few of the dozens of reality shows that let us watch people turn their “ordinary” houses into dream homes.

Reality TV to Real Life

This isn’t just entertaining television; it’s a way of life.

We spend hours surfing Pinterest for design ideas. We spend entire Saturday afternoons wandering the aisles of IKEA and Lowe’s. And we spend thousands of dollars turning our homes into miniature palaces.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans spent $130 billion on home improvement projects in 2013. Yes, that’s billion, with a “b.”

Necessary or Excessive?

I understand that many home improvement projects are absolutely necessary. A hole in the roof, for example, is not something you want to overlook. But we all know a good chunk of that $130 billion isn’t going toward roof repairs. It’s going toward one creature comfort after another until we no longer have a reason to leave the walls of our home.

When did home improvement in the United States become an obsession—and an idol?

I’m not here to determine what is a reasonable home repair for you and what’s excessive; I’m just asking you to think about it.

I’m not trying to tell you how much money to spend; just make sure it’s carefully budgeted like anything else.

I’m not looking to give you a guilt trip about how your living space ranks on a global scale. I am reminding you to be thankful.

Finding a Balance

It’s good to make our homes safe, clean, peaceful places where families can live and play and grow together.

It’s not good to make our homes into idols, where precious time, energy and money are taken away from the most important parts of life—our relationships with God and one another.

I’ll leave you with the words of 1 John 2:15-17 from The Message. These are words that continually challenge me. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father.

Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him.

The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.

Sometimes my prayers sound like a heavenly To Do List for God. I fill in different names and circumstances depending on the day.

Oh, God, please heal _________ from _________.

Comfort _________, who is struggling with _________.

Keep _________ safe while he travels.

Show my skeptical friend, _________ that you love her.

Forgive me for _________.

I know I’m not the only one with a laundry list of prayer requests. And the Bible says we should pray for one another, so there is nothing wrong with asking God for those things.

There’s also nothing wrong with putting the list down from time to time and just being thankful for what God has already done.

The Thanksgiving season seems as good a time as any to do so.

If, like me, it’s been a while since you set the list aside (God already knows it better than you do, by the way) and just thanked Him, would you join me in offering a simple prayer of thanksgiving this season?

If we practice thankfulness, perhaps our prayer list will begin to look a little more like this:

Oh, God, thank you for the time you healed _________ from _________.

Thank you for comforting me when I was struggling with _________.

Thank you for all the times you’ve kept _________ safe while he traveled.

Thank you for loving my skeptical friend, _________, even if she doesn’t know it yet.

And thank you, thank you, thank you for allowing your own Son to die and come back to life, all so that I could be forgiven. You are amazing. In Jesus’ name, amen.

The FaithWorks Financial Team wishes you a happy and blessed Thanksgiving.

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