God and Me-Distraction

Distraction. I think that sums up the past few weeks for me. It is the advent season and generally I have been too distracted to really care. We've had something break about once a week now for the past 6 weeks or so. The transmission in D's truck. The suspension in my car. Our corn stove. A leaking water pipe under the street in front of our house which to make a long story short, may or may not be our responsibility. A non working furnace last Friday which is now working but needs someone to come look at it to see why it stopped. And a dead car battery in my car. Those have been financial distractions as well as things that have just been irritating. Of course, there is no news on Conleigh. I know some files from her orphanage that had been stuck saw some movement based on what someone else said online but no one has replied to tell us it was ours. So I'm assuming we're still in the same place we have been. We're going on 15 months in one place. That's a distraction. And ABC has been running night after night of classic Christmas movies which have been fun to watch with Kenson. But also distracting because they shift the Christmas focus from Jesus to Santa. I know that sounds silly but I have felt like we've been on Santa overload with little emphasis on the baby Jesus story. It seems like the times I've had to center my heart on the meaning of Christmas have just been when I'm at church. (Which is good because it means our church is helping people see the the true meaning of Christmas, but I wish my heart were living with the true meaning a bit more during the rest of the week.)

I want my heart to remember how Christmas is this wild story of a pursuing God who hatched a crazy plan to draw His children to Himself. How God Himself put on flesh and came to earth to be the One who crushes sin. How this arrival on earth is part of an amazing thread of events and people from the Old Testament who were promised that He would be coming. How a baby born to a virgin, laid in a manger, raised to be a carpenter, turned water to wine, healed sinners both physically and spiritually, and raised the dead. How that wooden manger became a wooden cross where He bore my sins (and everyone else's) so that we would come close to the God who created us. And how He refused to be defined by a humble birth and a dark cross but instead rose from the dead. How this resurrection is just a foreshadowing of a second coming where He will reign over all the earth and a new heaven and earth will ultimately be established. That's the Christmas story I need to hear. That's the story I want to have in my heart, not worries about money or impatience over problems or even the stories of a kindly but totally invented character named Santa Claus