I don’t know all of why this might be the case, but I feel about as unprepared for Christmas as I have ever been. I don’t know if it is the bad weather we have had that throws me off. I don’t know if it is the way my attention has been somewhat divided with being part of the Upper Midwest delegation to General Conference. It might be end of year stuff piling up and taking more time than I would like. It may be something else entirely, but I am not ready for Christmas, either for my responsibilities as a pastor or for our family plans.
It is a reminder about the power and beauty of Christmas. The world wasn’t ready for Jesus to come, either. On the one level, we say that all of creation was waiting and groaning for God to come and making things right. However, most people didn’t know what was going on. Even in Israel, when people would be more ready to hear from God, most of them didn’t know about it. We read about shepherds being told and wise men from the east but, for most people it was just another day. They had no idea what it would mean.
I think that it is easy to imagine that, if God is doing something among us, it would be impossible to miss. The problem is that, in the Bible, people miss what God is doing all the time. It is precisely where people aren’t looking that God is often most at work. If Jesus were born today, he wouldn’t be on the news. We probably wouldn’t even hear about it until he started making waves about thirty years later.
What is God doing in our midst that we are missing because we are caught up with everything else in the world? The other things might be good, they might be important in their own way, but what are they preventing us from seeing?
Our Ad. Council meetings have changed shape a bit this year. I started introducing topics and then we break into smaller groups to discuss questions. I am the one who writes the questions so I was a bit surprised how one of them hit me harder than I expected. It was about what people wished they had done more or less of in leadership this year. My answer was that I wish I had done more “mentoring.” I didn’t just mean that I wished I spent more time visiting with people one on one, although I do wish that, too. I mean I wish I spent less time doing the various tasks of ministry and more time equipping other people to do them.
Time spent equipping others is almost always the best use of our time. It might take time away from other things in the short term, but over the long term, passing on what you know, and helping others to be more effective will have a bigger impact. The difficulty is that it always takes longer to help someone else know what to do than it does to just do it yourself. Because of that, if we go from one urgent thing to another, we tend to always do things ourselves and never share the responsibility with others.
I am going to try to do more of that next year. Not because I can’t or don’t want to do some of these things, but because it is best for the church and best for others to be built up. What can you pass on to others in this next year?