A Season of Advent: Love (Part 5)

by Nancy Cox, Reception & Accounting

CHRISTMAS HAS ARRIVED!!! By now presents are wrapped (or at least in our possession), food is prepared, friends and family have arrived, or you have arrived here to visit. Or perhaps this is a difficult time because of the loss of loved ones, difficult memories, a broken home, or financial struggles. We have all come here for different reasons and one common reason: a tiny baby named JESUS!

Now its time to take a moment of rest and ponder the last of our advent words—“LOVE.” As mentioned in previous articles, the world seems to take words like Love and define them in a much different way than God does in the Bible. The world tells us love is “all about us and how we can benefit from it,” but scripture tells us the exact opposite. In fact, love is all about giving of ourselves during our time here on earth. I Corinthians 13:4-8 tells us: “Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast; it is not proud. It is not rude; it is not selfish; it is not easily angered; it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”  How different would our homes, relationships, church, community, and yes, even shopping malls, parking lots, and roads be if these aspects of love were always practiced.

Growing up in a home with a Dad, who is a World War II and Korean War veteran as well as a career police officer, and a Mom, who is a nurse, they were wise to teach us kids to live these words of I Corinthians. As a result, our Christmases were not traditional. We would celebrate according to our parents’ work schedules. Christmas Eve, Christmas day, the day after, morning, evening, afternoon: it was different each year. Dad told stories of sitting alone in a diner one Christmas eve during World War II and hearing Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas” on the radio and missing his best friend who had been shot down somewhere over Europe. Mom always reminded us that it was our gift of love to the community when she was nursing and Dad was on duty. When he was working, people would be protected, and she and others at the hospital would provide care. Never did they make us feel we were somehow being cheated by rearranging our Christmas. Dad reminded us that our freedom to even celebrate Christ’s birth in this country had come at great cost of love from the service men, women, and their families. My husband and I pray we have shared these same values with our grown children as they have grown up in a firefighter family.

Perhaps this is what God intended love to look like from each of us during our time here on earth: Not for what we can receive or what works best for us or our schedules or emotions, but rather what we can give. It’s true that we see a lot of giving this time of year: gifts are donated; warming centers are opened for the homeless; holiday meals are prepared for those without; packages are sent overseas to those serving in the military and missions. These are all incredible outpourings of love and should always continue and not just at Christmas. I John 3:18 tells us, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and truth.” 

On a much more personal level of action, what are the places that strike a chord in the deepest part of our being? Those places look different for each of us tonight, whether you are a newly married couple learning to divide your holidays between two families or a family that needs to learn to share a loved one. Your situation may be a marriage or family that needs repair, bad habits, disappointments, lonliness, health challenges, absent loved ones, or other situations. What act of love could alter these situations?  It could be internal, like a changed attitude or external, like hug or smile.

Whatever your circumstances tonight, remember “God is love.” (I John 4:16). He made His actions clear: He sent His Son to save us. He loves and wants a relationship with each of us, and not temporarily but forever.  “For God so LOVED the world that He gave His only Son that whoever would believe in Him would not perish but have eternal life,” (I John 3:16). All we need to do is receive the greatest gift of love ever given.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!