The holiday season, in many ways, has been hijacked. Instead of Earth receiving her King, she seems to get stressed out and bent on consumerism. We look forward to this time with nostalgia, and then somewhere in the midst of it all, we realize that we’re worn-out, overcommitted, frantic, and not at all the people we want to be during a meaningful season. The holidays become a fast-moving weeks-long sprint that leaves us weary and longing for more meaning—and then glad it’s over.
At this time of year, maybe more than any other time, even though the calendar may be full, we tend to disconnect from others, from God, and even from parts of ourselves. For some, this disconnection happens when our focus is on the things we need to do. Life becomes a checklist, full of holiday planning and travel and end-of-the-year business reports and deliverables. For others, this disconnection happens when our focus is so inward that all we can see is our own desires, longings, and year-end what-ifs.
Disconnection wreaks havoc in every aspect of our lives. We cannot flourish without being connected to God, others, and ourselves—it’s how we were made.
How do we change this? How do we reconnect and fully experience all that is before us this holiday season?
Human Beings with Human Needs
God created us with bodies and said it was very good. Jesus came and dwelled among us in a body. He was resurrected back to life after death in His body. So we, too, include our bodies in our seeking of Jesus and in our spiritual formation. We don’t just have bodies; we are bodies. Bodily creatures.
And of course these bodies come with all sorts of needs. To thrive, we need connection to God, ourselves, and others. This holiday season of Thanksgiving (in the United States), Christmas, and the New Year is no different. When the holidays get busy and we begin to mentally and even physically disconnect, we miss out on the quiet but steady invitation from God to pause. He invites us to see, touch, hear, smell, taste, and sense that He is with us and at work, for our relationships with God are not one-dimensional.
And that is our hope this holiday season.
In the uniqueness of the season, we have an opportunity to engage God’s presence with our whole selves, including our senses and emotions, as we believe intimacy with Him is meant to be full, multisensory, and experiential.
He created us to see Him in nature and the people around us.
He created us to feel His presence in the wind, the rain, and a walk in the woods.
He created us to hear Him in a children’s choir, in birdsong, and in a quiet whisper.
He created us to smell His creativity in the scent of Christmas pine and Grandma’s from-scratch sugar cookies.
He created us to taste His faithful provision in the warmth of our morning coffee and in the sharing of bread and wine at the Lord’s Table.
He created us to experience self-awareness as we’re also aware of His presence.
The Sixth Sense
You may be curious about the last sense we mentioned—the one we’re calling self-awareness. While the other senses are self-explanatory, this sixth sense is worthy of elaboration.
The term proprioception was first coined in 1906 by Charles Scott Sherrington, a neurophysiologist. The word comes from the Latin propriu, which means “one’s own,” and percepio, which means “perceive.” This term describes the gathering of sensory information from microscopic neural receptors embedded in joints, muscles, and tendons that allow a person to sense where their physical body is at any given moment, in any location. Sherrington defined it as “the perception of joints and body movement as well as position of the body, or body segments, in space.”
In essence, Sherrington had identified a sixth sense.
Today, there is heightened attention given to this sense as researchers try to understand proprioceptive dysfunction, especially in children. “Children suffering from proprioceptive dysfunction are un-coordinated and have difficulty performing basic normal childhood tasks and activities. They don’t experience the world like the majority of people.”
While research on proprioception centers around brain and body physiology, we know that our emotions, our thoughts, our convictions, our desires are intrinsically intertwined with our body’s experience of the world. As Tish Harrison Warren puts it, “Christianity is a thoroughly embodied faith. We believe in the incarnation—Christ came in a body. . . . In the Scriptures we find that the body is not incidental to our faith, but integral to our worship.” This time of year, more than any other time, we remember and rejoice that God came to redeem humanity through humanity, in the person of Jesus.
This sixth sense—our ability to perceive in our bodies our very existence in time and space—is about our whole-self experience of the world. Proprioception is a mouthful, so here we’ll refer to it as self-awareness. Self-awareness is the sense we probably rely on the most while also ignoring it the most. For that reason, we have included more opportunities to practice self-awareness than any other sense in the devotional.
Like Jesus, we are in this moment in a body. We take up space. We are present. We have feelings in our body and in our mind in real time. And thanks be to God, Jesus wants to meet us not in ignoring our self but in being self-aware. . . .
Our Prayer for You
We believe King Jesus wants to meet you in all your human vulnerability. We believe He wants to show you His glory this holiday season. What better way to meet Jesus, the Son of Man, than to encounter His presence with all your very human senses? To pray and seek God with both the head and the heart? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? To reclaim the holidays for your heart’s formation and the glory of God?
With this posture and using this daily practice, let’s experience the wonder of God with us.
—Excerpt adapted from Sense of Wonder: Delighting in God’s Presence throughout the Holiday Season, written by Hannah Opliger & Amanda Luedeke. Used by permission of Our Daily Bread Publishing®, Grand Rapids MI. All rights reserved. Further distribution is prohibited without written permission from Our Daily Bread Publishing® at permissionsdept@odb.org.
