Advent: Love
If you want to see people very happy, I have a place and time for you to look. Go to an airport a few days before Christmas. You don’t have to go inside the airport, just to to the “arrivals” lane outside, where people are waiting with their cars to greet travelers. You won’t have to spend more than thirty minutes there before you see it. Happy people coming out of the building as they see their friends and family waiting for them.
To many people this is part of the definition of Christmas. The holiday serves as a great reason to reconnect with family and friends. They wrote a song about this very thing:
Oh, there’s no place like
Home for the holidays,
‘Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine
Of a friendly face
For the holidays, you can’t beat
Home, sweet home
AAA Travel project as many as 115.2 million Americans will travel more than 50 miles this year over the holiday period. Although some of those travelers are going to a vacation destination, I am willing to bet that most are visiting loved ones. Why do family members and friends come “home” for the holidays? The answer must have something to do with love. We want to be with the people we love on special times of year, don’t we? There is something magical about Christmas time, when you know that loved ones will be near. The specific circumstances don’t really matter all that much. The presents, the food, the agenda. Those things are nice, but what is important is the time spent with the ones you love.
And what about those of us that host those family gatherings? What do we do to prepare for the inrush of those we love? We clean, of course. The time before the holidays is a time of great cleaning throughout the house. They really should coin the phrase “holiday cleaning” rather than “spring cleaning.” It’s our way of preparing for the special event.
The fourth Advent candle is the candle of love. It is lit with the expectation that the greatest family visitor of all time, Jesus, is coming to us.
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine,
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.
So what do we do to prepare? A cleaning of sorts takes place too, doesn’t it? Not of the house, but of the heart. We look forward to the love that happens when Jesus comes to visit.
Matthew 1:22-23
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
Take time to reflect this Christmas about what it really means to have Jesus come “home” to you. What will you do to prepare for that?
God Bless and Merry Christmas