The Christmas You Deserve

For the past few years, my Christmas seasons haven’t looked like I wanted them to. Last year, a water leak necessitated the removal and replacement of the flooring in half my home—during the month of December. The year before that, my grandpa had recently passed away, and all the should-be-merriment didn’t feel quite right. And the year before that, a global pandemic had turned every aspect of life into something I barely recognized. Between all those unfortunate circumstances, I’ve found myself thinking, “This year’s Christmas had better be good. I deserve it.”

Whether it’s a better Christmas season, a relaxing vacation, a smoother back-to-school transition—or bigger things like thinking we deserve to have an easy time parenting one kid after challenges with another or deserving to be healthy after a bout of illness—we can all find ourselves thinking we deserve this or that because of our circumstances or our actions.

This idea of “deserving” certain good things starts to get murky, however, when we look to the Bible. There are many promises that God makes, such as being with us (Isaiah 41:10), loving us (John 3:16), and working out what’s best for us (Romans 8:28). But we don’t find much about deserving to have a particularly easy or pain-free life. Passages like Ephesians 2:8-9 remind us that we don’t even deserve to be saved, and it’s not our goodness that saves us either—only Jesus can.

It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.

So, as we look to the Christmas story itself, what was the first Christmas like for them? We don’t get a lot of information about how Mary felt about her circumstances, but her birth story would’ve elicited some wide eyes and dropped jaws when she told it to fellow moms in later years. She was chosen by God to carry His own Son, then she traveled away from home while nine months pregnant with her not-yet-husband by her side and the whispers of the villagers at their backs. Ultimately, she gave birth in a barn, and lowly shepherds were her first visitors. It’s hard to think of many more ways this could’ve been a less than ideal way for the Savior of the world to arrive.

When we get a glimpse at Mary’s response to all that had happened to her, however, it’s not a sense of disappointment that her circumstances weren’t better. The NIV uses strong language to describe it in Luke 2:19:

Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

It doesn’t even say she just “looked back on” what happened, but that she treasured up all these things.

We may not get the Christmas season we think we deserve this year. Family fights may still occur, or illness will derail plans, or the store will run out of the special ingredient for the dish that makes Christmas feel like Christmas. In the midst of all the mishaps, though, maybe we can learn from Mary’s example to treasure up all these things. It could be that this Christmas season will challenge us more acutely to keep looking back at the real reason for the season—Jesus. Though those are simple enough words to read, they’re much more difficult to live. God will give us what we truly need this Christmas, even if it might look different from what we think we deserve. Mary didn’t have a perfect birth story, but she did have the perfect Savior lying in her arms—and He’s present in our lives too.

–Written by Brianna DeWitt. Used by permission from the author.