Christmas is Messy

Christmas is messy.

We go to great lengths to decorate our homes and get the matching outfits for Christmas cards and prepare delicious food at our Christmas dinners and delight our friends and family with the most thoughtful gifts.

It’s a lot of pressure.

And a lot of work.

There are a lot of extra things on our to-do lists during the holiday season.

There are also a lot of extra things on our calendars during the holiday season (reducing the likelihood of accomplishing all the things on the to-do list).

Mix that up with the expectations of others (real and/or perceived) and the meanings we have attached to doing all the things and we have the ingredients for a hot mess.

 So far, I am just writing about the “extra” Christmas things – It gets even more complicated when we add in the difficult family dynamics that go on behind closed doors in our families.

Since nobody talks about that stuff openly, we can assume that we are alone with whatever dysfunction is happening in our family. 

Maybe it's not so much dysfunction, but more so grief. It feels difficult to connect to “the most wonderful time of the year” when we have complicated, deep family dynamics at play.

Real life is just not a Hallmark movie that resolves with a happy ending in 2 hours.

But then again, the very first Christmas was most decidedly unlike the visions of sugarplum perfection we tend to assign our ideas of what Christmas *should* be like.

It was messy, too.

My idea for this article was to really paint a picture of how very messy that first Christmas actually was.

I started researching the historical context that surrounded that first Christmas and quickly discovered how easy it is for us to use our imagination to fill in the information that the Bible leaves out.  And then assume we are right and create certainty around the story we embellished. 

We can get ourselves into trouble doing this, if we don’t have our facts straight. 

I remember when my son was little, he put on a one-man Christmas Story “show” in the family room. In his version, Joseph was visited by the angel as the couple was almost to Bethlehem, and said, “Joseph, you are going to be a great daddy! In about a half an hour!”

(His version also featured the wise men delivering Baby Jesus.)

The story that existed in my imagination, before I really slowed myself down and studied it went something like this:

Mary went into labor while riding the donkey on the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem, because why else would there be no room at the inn?  If they had gotten there before she went into labor, you’d think they would have gotten it together to figure out a place to stay before labor started.  So, (says my imagination, and a lot of movies and stories written about Christmas), she went into labor on the way and a stingy innkeeper said “No Room at the Inn”  when Mary and Joseph were scrambling to find a place to give birth. The innkeeper reluctantly offers up his stable, and Joseph delivers the baby there, amongst the cows and chickens.

Well, maybe not chickens.

It turns out, I actually made this Christmas mess more messy by inserting my assumptions.

Don’t we do that with our messes, too?

(More on that later).

There is a lot that we just don’t actually know about that first Christmas.

• Was there a donkey? We don’t know.

• Did anyone travel with them? (like a midwife?) The Bible doesn’t say so. But the Bible also doesn’t not say so.  

  We don’t know.

• How far along was Mary’s pregnancy when they started their journey? (She was at least more than three months into it, but other than that…we don’t know.)

• Did labor start on the trip? There’s no timeline to tell us. So, yeah…we don’t know.

• Was there even an innkeeper? Did Bethlehem even have an actual inn? It was close enough to Jerusalem and small enough that, unless there was some kind of census, Bethlehem very likely couldn’t support the need for an inn. But even that is speculation. We don’t know.

• Did Joseph deliver the baby? That would have been really counter-cultural. Men just didn’t do that. Especially if they were with female relatives who could help. We have no idea.

• Were there animals present while Mary was delivering? All we know is that there was a manger.

  Which means, we don’t know.

I am not going to unpack all of the rabbit trails I followed trying to track this stuff down.

It was fascinating.

I found out that Bible scholars do not agree on how to fill in that missing information. This is one reason I am not detailing my research tangents – I don’t want to give the impression that it is definitively figure-out-able when we are working with educated guesses at best.

There is a lot of the story we have assumed – which usually happens when we find ourselves in life’s messes, too.

We make our messes messier by the thoughts we attach to them.

Even with so many missing details, the Biblical accounts of the first Christmas still tell a messy story.

I actually love that it tells a messy story.

The mess is kind of the point of Christmas.

This world is messy.

People are messy.

Relationships are messy.

That’s what happens with free will.

We are not going to all agree, be perfect, never hurt each other.

That’s why God needed to send Jesus in the first place. 

The people in the Old Testament times were looking for a Messiah to come and save them from their messy world. They thought He would change the mess, get rid of it, so they would have peace and comfort.

Instead, God sent the Messiah right into the mess, in a humble, messy way.

He sent the Messiah to be God-with-us, Immanuel.

He is our peace and comfort in the middle of our messes.

So what do we do in those messy seasons?

Let’s take some inspiration from the Bible characters.

Be thoughtful, like Joseph

Some people jump to immediate action, and there is a time and place for that.

There is also value in thoughtful reflection.

He did his share of filling in logical details without supernatural revelation that Mary spoke the truth. Without the angel’s appearance in Joseph’s dreams, His solution was logical, kind, and honorable. We don’t know the timeline for how long he took to come to that decision, but we know he delayed long enough to at least take a nap on it.

Just like we are quick to take creative liberty to fill in the gaps of that first Christmas story, we do the same thing all the time with our everyday life circumstances. We think we know what other people are thinking, what their motivations are, what catastrophic thing will surely happen, and our imaginations are off to the races, leaving the rational part of our brains behind.

We do not always take the time to be as rational as Joseph was. Instead we run our thoughts through personal filters made from our own experiences, pain, insecurities, fears.

Sometimes (often?) we are waaaaaaaaaay off.

Ways to think through our messes

• Separate our thoughts and feelings from the facts.

  Just like we looked at the story in Luke 2 with careful eyes today and separated out the assumptions we’ve made based on tradition, we can look at our situations that way. The facts are different from what we think about the facts. Our thoughts about the facts are different from our feelings about the facts. We all have individual filters that we run the facts through. These little filters are usually based on our own experiences, and when our own experiences are triggered we can easily add meaning to something that was never there to begin with.

  I like to use my FACETS framework to separate out all the pieces we blob together in our messes.

• Think about God’s character.

  Several years ago, I did a Beth Moore study on James (1). She emphasized the importance of rehearsing God’s character. We may be missing the feelings of connection and joy related to God during hard times, but we can do the cognitive action of rehearsing God’s character. What we know about God’s character can stand strong as a foundation (as a fact) when our emotions are all over the place.

• Focus on the good.

  In Philippians 4:8, Paul says, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

  Focusing our thoughts on what is good can help us step away from what doesn’t feel good.

  Doing this can remind us that our circumstances are not all 100% bad.

  Just looking for something good can be a baby step to fostering hope.

• Take thoughts captive (2 Cor 10:5)

  As a counselor I am a big advocate for feeling our feelings. When we avoid feeling our feelings things usually get worse and explode on us (usually at very inopportune times).

  We can learn how to feel our feelings, and part of that involves managing our thoughts about our feelings. A feeling is really just a body sensation that will move on through our bodies, but our thoughts about our feelings can keep us stuck in those feelings.

  When we take our thoughts captive we find ways to contain our thoughts so they do not consume us.

Walk in faith, like Mary

We don’t know how much she knew about the ramifications of what God was asking of her. 

Do any of us really know what we are getting ourselves into most of the time?

As a military spouse, I hate when people say (of military spouses), “She knew he was in the military when she married him” (as if this is supposed to eliminate any struggles that come with being married to someone in the military).  Sure, I knew he was in the military, but I had no idea what being married to someone in the military would actually be like. In good ways and hard ways.

Mary was obedient. She asked questions, but what she knew about God outweighed her concerns about the consequences.

Reach out, also like Mary

I love that she did this!

She heard about Elizabeth and went to spend some time with her.

She sought out someone who would understand, someone who would have Godly counsel for her.  I think it is such a blessing that God puts people in our path to encourage us.  This is a good reason to be connected to others.

Keep working,

like the

Shepherds

This might be a stretch, but some of the Bible scholars I read talked about how shepherds were the outcasts of society so I didn’t want to leave them out of my article.

Hear me out…

I think what I want to say about them is to do the job that God calls us to while waiting for Him to make a way through your mess.

They were waiting and hoping for a Messiah, just like the other Jewish people.

They felt the brunt of the messy world, as marginalized people.

They kept doing what they knew to do while they were waiting.  

Sometimes, in the middle of a mess, we just keep plugging along. 

Make it stand out

Proclaim God’s goodness, like the angels.

(And the Shepherds. And Mary.)

Proclaiming God’s goodness really ties in with the way we think about our messes. 

It focuses our brains on what is good.

It is another way of rehearsing God’s character.

It incorporates gratitude and connects us to something bigger than ourselves. Something that leaves us awestruck.

Seek, like the Magi

We can spend time in prayer, asking Him for wisdom. James 1:5 tells that God will give us wisdom if we ask Him for it.

We can look for God’s guidance in the Bible, making sure to read carefully and consider the context of what we find.

We can be determined to look for God, look for ways to honor Him.

I don’t know whether you are facing a messy holiday season, but the longer I walk this planet, the more I realize that we all have our messes.

God is with us in our messes.

We can seek Him like the Magi, while we keep plugging like the shepherds and take time to slow our thoughts down. We can step out in the obedience that comes from faith. We can reach out to others who get it along the way.

And proclaim God’s goodness through it all.

We can be okay even if everything is not perfect.

We can be okay even if everything around us seems to be falling apart.

The “Christmas magic” is not something we can generate for everyone.

God did that over 2,000 years ago. 

Reference

1. Moore, B. (2011). James: Mercy triumphs over judgement. Lifeway.

Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her office in Carlisle, PA. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.