Advent Love for Homemakers
- Allison Weeks
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A companion blog for The Art of Home's Monday Motivation #43, Season 26, Ep17
There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays
by Jeanette Rath, Homemaker
I pinch my eyes closed as I stumble blindly, still half asleep, from my bedroom across the hallway, passing by the upper landing so that I can savor the annual picturesque view of the living room sparkling below. But the crackle of a fire, a brightly colored glow that filters through my eyelashes, and the smell of scrumptious holiday treats overcome my senses all at once.
I open my eyes to Christmas.
Daddy is hunching over the wood-burning stove feeding that lovely fire and Mama is sitting nearby wrapped in a bright red throw with a tiny cup of coffee laced through her fingers. They look up, waiting to see which of us would rise first so that they could say, “Merry Christmas!”
Not everyone has the best memories about Christmas, but for my family, Christmas was the happiest day of the year. All of us together, enjoying our favorite foods and showering one another with simple tokens of our love, felt that the world and everything within those four walls was right.
As an adult starting a family of my own, I seem to have lost something along the way. Christmas only depletes the hope, love and joy it had freely given to me when I was a child.
I'm going to be completely honest- I wrestle with Christmas every year. Perhaps it is the burden of life, a year’s worth of weariness and pain that makes it so hard to even try to wear a smile.
As a child I remember that no matter how hard the year had been, Christmas made it all better. Today, it doesn’t seem like enough to erase the sorrow all around me. As Christmas lights begin to line the streets of town, they seem to mock the hidden tears behind them.
There is a version of Christmas that delivers a broken promise. If we only believe, it shouts, Christmas will restore its own magic. Media, TV and pop songs insist that we are a hard-headed, cold-hearted Scrooge if we refuse to dance to the commercial tune that hammers us in the overstuffed weeks leading up to December 25th.
More gifts, more parties, more extravagant displays of wealth all promise to deliver us from the plague of sadness that continues to follow us year after year.
As songs of Hope and Joy ring in my ears, I can't seem to find it anywhere.
That’s where the true Christmas Story begins. The prophet Isaiah wrote ,“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” (Isaiah 9:2)
The Christmas miracle begins with people longing for things to be right. People like me, who are tired of the parade of wrongs, dressed in smiles and bright colors.
Christmas comes to those with an open, honest heart. But where do we go for this change?
More consumerism? The pride of holiday parties and finery? Or even the love of family?
Raised in the church, many of us have the key right before us, hiding in plain sight: the "Reason for the Season," as some like to call it, and we sing about it every week. God’s gift to man: His only Son, born lowly in a manger. Yet even this has become a thinned-out, watered-down version of the Greatest Gift of all time.
Christmas has become marked by the demands of dissatisfied people but it started as the celebration of selfless giving.
What made my childhood home a haven of hope and joy?
When I think of my family’s Christmases, I do not recall the things I received from asking, but the many gifts of love given from the kindness of my family’s hearts.
Father and Mother’s love is a representation of the very love of God. The endless work, care, and specialness prepared for children by their parents, whether rich or poor, is a picture of the Divine.
In the middle of this world’s simplified Nativity story, I can find the most incredible detail that makes all the difference to me.
God’s Greatest Gift came to us from the fellowship of His own Home.
Truly, from His Home to Ours.
Have you ever thought of His Home? All the twinkling lights, crackling fires, and magical memories cannot suffice to picture the joys of Heaven, the Fellowship of the Holy Trinity, and the Love they share between one another.
What amazement to know that even in all this perfection God chose to sacrifice His precious Son to bring us Home!
What joy, to be loved by Love Himself, to have a Home prepared where there will be no sorrow and sadness, where no one will be missing, and everything will be right. Is there anything like it?
There is one thing that gives me an inkling of this incredible picture.
Christmas.
But the Greatest of These is Love
by Allison Weeks, Homemaker
If I speak human or angelic tongues but do not have love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains but do not have love,
I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions,
and if I give over my body in order to boast but do not have love,
I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs.
Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends...
Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-8a, 13
Ah, the famous love chapter of 1 Corinthians. Often read at weddings as a benediction and a warning to the bride and groom embarking on a journey, that if they knew how much it would challenge their expectations of love, they might never even begin.
There is nothing like the home-life to show you what it does and does not mean to truly love and be loved.
That, I believe, is why God created the family and the home. It is the classroom in which He teaches us how to love like He does. It’s the place where He dispels our Hollywood-fed, self-focused notions of love that look for another person to say, “You complete me”.
No, He, who is Love (1 John 4:16), completes us. When we find our identity in the Lover of our souls we are free to give and receive love without expectations or conditions.
As we prepare and do all the Christmas things this month, let’s consider the importance of operating out of God’s love rather than whatever affection we can muster in our own strength.
If I create the most beautiful Christmas decorations with vintage ornaments, paper chains, plaid and bows but have not love, I am a con-artist, creating a facade of something that doesn’t exist.
If I bake all the cookies and make a Christmas dinner worthy of a magazine cover,
but have not love, I am spreading the smell of death, not life, through my kitchen efforts.
If I buy mountains of gifts for my family, wrapped in the most trendy paper and bows,
but have not love, I am a bearer of emptiness, or worse extortion, saying you now owe me, this or that.
Love is patient with people and their messes, both physical and emotional.
Love is kind to all, even the toddler or the teenager having an emotional meltdown on Christmas morning.
Love does not look at another homemaker’s decorations, husband, children or body with the side-long glance of envy.
Love doesn’t arrogantly boast its way through the season.
It doesn’t rudely look at the frazzled sister, mother-in-law, or husband and say, “Why can’t they get their act together and help more with Christmas this year? Do I have to do everything in this family? It’s a good thing I’m high-capacity.”
Love does not decorate, bake and give out of self-seeking motives and then become irritable when things don’t work out as expected.
Love does not keep a record of poor holiday manners; the gift that wasn’t appreciated, the thank you that never came, the unannounced guest, the backhanded compliments from a mother-in-law.
Love bears, believes, hopes and endures, not some things-those which are convenient or those which fit neatly into our holiday plans-but all things.
I can do (or bear/believe/hope/endure) all things through Christ who gives me strength.
And when this year’s gifts are forgotten, the meals digested, and the decor tucked away into the attic, these three gifts of the Spirit remain; faith, hope and love.
Faith, to trust Jesus with the outcome of all our Christmas plans, hope in His promise to be with us in the merry and the messy, and love to ignite our hearts with worship and wonder as we celebrate the King who came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for ours. [Matthew 20:28]
The greatest of these is love.
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