Christmas means everything

Christmas means everything.

An infant in the womb carries all the potential of a full human life. Similarly, at Christmas we celebrate in seed form all of Christian faith, hope, and love. That’s why, whenever we start talking about Advent or Christmas, there’s no telling where we will end up.

One of my favorite Advent meditations this year ended up exploring the gospel idea of Adoption. The common plight of all humanity is that we are orphans, we are lost, we are on our own. The common hope of all humanity is that God loves us and has adopted us into his family in Jesus. So any relationship with God involves obligation to our Christian family. I love what the author has to say about this:

The same Spirit who moves us to cry, “Abba” teaches us also to cry, “Brother.”

This one sentence also captures so much of what we are about at Life Action. We help create contexts where people can be brought face to face with God and with their neighbor. Then we urge them to act on that in obedience.

Since we hit the road again in September, we’ve participated in a lot of events and activities. So much of we do isn’t on the stage. It happens in quiet conversations with discouraged leaders. It’s personal interactions with church members who aren’t quite sure about hosting strangers in their homes.

These stories and many others highlight what we’re actually about in our church events. We remind believers that they are part of a family — a community shaped by gratitude, honesty, fidelity, and hospitality. Big grace in small places.

And that is what Christmas is about.

So many of you have been praying for us and partnering with us in this work. We get that it’s sometimes hard to really grasp what we’re up to, bouncing around the country with our team. In a couple days, Life Action is releasing a special documentary about what our teams do. Subscribe to our Youtube channel to be notified when it drops on December 26th!

Merry Christmas!