Our family does not all celebrate Christmas together. I suppose it's not a unique phenomenon, as there are doubtless other families whose extended branches are too far-flung to be gathered back to the root every holiday. It has made for some fun Christmas finagling; we celebrated on Christmas Eve and Christmas night with my mom's parents (who live a half-mile up the road), but that was the extent of our family celebrations (outside of our immediate family) until this weekend.
My mom's sister's family live in Alpharetta, just outside Atlanta, and so both their driving up and our driving down are far too much of a hassle for even a long weekend. We used to celebrate Christmas with them back in the days when my cousins and siblings and I were all munchkins, but as our lives got busier, neither of our families ended up being able to make the ten-hour drive to share festivities. It's sad that the distance between us keeps us from being able to keep making those memories, but sometimes the necessities of life force us to make sacrifices.
My dad's side of the family (his dad and his sister's family), however, lives in North Carolina, which is a much more manageable distance, and so yesterday and today constituted our surrogate Christmas. We watched my little sister play basketball (the first people in nine years to wear face paint to an Upward Basketball game), shared verivorst (a traditional Estonian Christmas dish consisting of barley soaked in blood and cooked in a sausage skin: literally "blood sausage") and sauerkraut and pork roast and sweet potatoes, observed a short food fight (that was courtesy of my little sister and our boisterous cousin) that was quickly put down by parental authority, and then chatted late into the night while some people watched the Patriots trounce the Colts.
They just left our house, and it was, like all partings, a bittersweet one. I am very much a social creature, and so leaving someone or watching someone leave is always very difficult for me. Not in the sense that I'm about to break down and cry, but merely in the sense that I thrive on connection and relationship, and that I feel dry when I have to part from a family member who is a source of that for me. It's hard for me to say goodbye, especially when I don't very often get to see the people to whom I have to say it.
It's funny to think about the things that we crave, especially in light of the God Who created us. Why would He have programmed into my DNA a hunger for people and relationships so intense that it hurts to be without them? Why, for that matter, did He choose to become a person and live among His creations?
Relationships are not built by people. Think about it: do you remember how you met your best friend? Maybe you do, but do you remember the moment when they became as important to you as they are now? Did you choose for that to happen? Or did it just sort of... happen? Relationships are, in the purest sense of the word, accidental. We do not plan for them to happen. In a sense, they are like gravity: a byproduct of the interaction between two objects (in this case, persons). Certainly, God planned each relationship you have, but you did not, and if you were to look at who knows whom and who gets along with whom, there is no pattern to it. There is no rational formula we can use to predict relationships, and yet they are the most meaningful part of our lives.
Why?
God has a very interesting nature, and one unique in the entirety of existence. He is three distinct people in one complete person, which means that His very make-up and personality is based upon interaction and relationships. This was the entire root of why it was not good for man to be alone. Man is created in the image of God, and if God is relationship, how could man truly mirror His nature without someone to be in relationship with?
And that was also why God came down to earth as Jesus: to be in relationship with us. One of the limitations of our finite minds is that we cannot really relate to that which is different from us. We are uncomfortable around the new, the weird, the other. And God is nothing if not different from humanity. We are mortal, but He is immortal. We have one body, but He is everywhere. We know only what we have experienced, but He knows everything. We have limitations, but He can do anything. How could we really relate to someone like Him when He seems so very alien? We needed Him to be like us so that we could learn how to love Him in our simple, broken way.
And so He came.
God has inserted in us this deep need for relationships. Some people try to fill it with friends and family. Other people try to convince themselves that their love is enough to satisfy them. But the truth is that we want perfect love. We crave a friendship that will never disappoint us, a love that will never break our hearts, and so no human relationship we have will ever be enough. "My soul thirsts for God," says Psalm 42, and that is the perfect description of the feeling. Our lives are so empty when we try to fill our thirst with other things, because we need God. He programmed us to need Him. Imagine trying to fill your stomach with cotton candy, and then think that is what we try to do nearly all our lives.
We don't understand how desperately we desire God's love in our lives, because we don't ever take the time to stop and think about how much those around us disappoint us. It feels like a betrayal, doesn't it? It feels like it's somehow our problem, that we aren't happy with the friendships we have. It feels like we should be more grateful, that we need to try harder, that we should focus on the positive and ignore the negative. And so we buy each other chocolate and go for strolls down the beach, we make reservations at fancy restaurants and make ourselves look prettier for those we love. We do anything we can to drown out the voice God has placed inside us, that little reminder that tells us, "You are missing out on life."
So many of us experience a crisis in our lives because we feel ashamed of this voice. We don't see it as an invitation, we see it as a curse. We go to counselors to try to drown it out. We practice meditating, thinking positively, making lists of things we are grateful for, and yet we get no closer to finding peace. The voice of God is insistent, and will not be silenced by self-help tactics.
So we buy a fancy new car. We get a new job. We leave our families and start dating that cute girl from the office, that attractive guy who made eyes at us. Some of us quit our jobs and start a 401 (c). Others go to seminary, or move to India to share the Gospel.
Now, I am not trying to denigrate new cars or new jobs. I'm not trying to preach against the evils of non-profit organizations or the ministry. (I do not, however, condone in any way adultery or divorce.) All I am trying to point out is that we almost always miss the point. Even if we correctly diagnose the problem (albeit crudely) as a lack of "spirituality," our remedies will 99% be focused on the wrong thing.
We can't earn God's love with our actions. We cannot earn happiness with our actions, either, because our happiness is dependent on our relationships with God. When we try to do stuff to be more spiritual, we will fail, because spirituality is not an action. Spirituality is a state of our hearts, of our minds. The only way we can become more spiritual is by growing closer in our relationships with God.
How do we do that? Honestly, I'm still on a learning curve with this. I'm just a seventeen-year-old guy, and I have very few of the answers to life. All I know is that I have never been happier than when I am close to my Father, and I also know that when I am not close to my Father, doing churchy things, performing little religious rituals, and reading pithy pamphlets do nothing to solve the problem.
Our relationships with God are just that: relationships. How do you grow closer to another person? How do you strengthen your relationship? You spend time with them. You tell them about your life, about your hopes and dreams, about your fears and struggles. Certainly, God knows all of this already, but that doesn't matter. He wouldn't have put this desire for Him in our hearts if He didn't want us to be in a relationship with Him. It might seem silly, telling God things He already knows, but in doing so, we learn more about ourselves and we move ourselves into a position of openness toward God.
Maybe that's where we truly hear His voice.
Title is from "Fix You"
Lyrics by C. Martin
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