Sacred Mundane: The Blog

My parents maintain that they’ve only had one fight in their 41 years of marriage.

When Mom changed the family diet without warning.

“We’re now eating fruit every morning for breakfast!” She announced cheerfully. I don’t remember it (thankfully), but apparently Dad about blew his top. You see, the man loves his sausage and eggs, his oatmeal, his hashbrowns. The man don’t want no fruit for breakfast if you hear what I’m saying.

She quickly learned that changing the family’s traditions needs to happen slowly.

Now, the question I hear so often is this:

“How do you make your family follow along with your new giving priorities?”

That is, when you are newly burdened with a desire to give to poor, and you want to change your holiday-habits, how on earth do you do so without disappointing everyone else? What do you tell your kids? What about grandparents? Do you forbid them to buy your kids toys? What about Christmas morning? The question pertains to one particular day, but the principle can be applied to every day:

How do we establish new gospel-centered traditions?  

I’m certainly not the expert, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Go slow. Guaranteed, if you all of a sudden declare that there will be no more gift-giving or holiday shopping ever happening again, you will have World War III in your home. No bueno. Consider making small steps over the next five years. You’ll have much better results. (That same can be said with establishing new eating habits, as my mom learned!)
2. Make it fun. Over the past few years, my family has done more and more giving through Gospel for Asia. We buy pigs, goats, rabbits, Bibles, clean water. But we keep it fun. One year I gave my brother a rubber chicken and a stuffed bunny rabbit from the dollar store (symbolizing the gift we’d given in his name). Another year I gave hard-boiled eggs to everyone (again, chickens). Last year my brother gave Jeff an old Bible (sent Bibles to unreached people) and gave me a bottle of water (he drilled a well in my name).  There’s all sorts of creative ways to celebrate and keep it fun without heaping up more and more junk that we really don’t need. Get creative!
3. Let others be free. Personally, I feel that I am only responsible for the people under my roof. I’m not going to tell my parents, Jeff’s parents, or our aunts and uncles what they can and cannot do with their money. Plus, for heavens sake let grandparents be grandparents. Wild horses couldn’t keep Jeff’s and my parents from spoiling their grandkids. So we let them. We personally do not buy our children gifts. We do for their birthdays but not for Christmas. However, it’s wonderful that their grandparents do!  We’re free and so are they. (And I appreciate their amazing generosity!)
4. Never say, “We can’t afford.” Sometimes it’s easy to pull a cop-out and tell people or our children that we can’t afford certain things. But this communicates that we’re victims, which just isn’t true. Some people in our world are victims of absolute poverty. We are not. By saying, “We choose  not to buy those gifts this year so that we can bless some people in need,” we communicate an important truth. We believe that poverty-stricken people matter. We are choosing them.
5. Keep it real. Showing our children pictures of other children in need is so helpful in teaching them compassion. Daily look at pictures of children in need. When doing the Operation Christmas Child boxes, look at children in the age-group and talk about who might receive the box.  Help them see how real need is, and their hearts will be quicker to follow your new giving-traditions.

Isn’t it crazy that overnight the stores shelves went from Halloween costumes to Christmas lights?

The Word says we live “from strength to strength” but the World says we live “from shopping season to shopping season.” Guaranteed the minute the Christmas lights come down the Valentine chocolates and teddy bears will line the shelves. Not that I blame them. Truly, if we didn’t have the joy and wonder of Christ to celebrate of course we’d have to buy stuff to celebrate!

But we have something so much greater to celebrate, don’t we? And don’t we also have to be intentional every single year, to actually honor Christ at His birth instead of being swept along in the sea of consumerism and forgetting Him altogether? I know I do. And doing so doesn’t mean we can’t have a Christmas tree or bake cookies or give meaningful gifts, but it means preparing our hearts to honor Christ’s birth. 

How can we do this?

We’ll look together at just a few of the innumerable ways. And please, I would love to hear from you how your family prepares to celebrate Christ in the midst of Christmas. So feel free to leave a comment with your idea.

To kick it off, I’d love to share this video with you, from one of my favorite missions organizations, Gospel for Asia. GFA is a truly remarkable organization, and if you’ve never read it, I highly encourage you to read Revolution in World Missions (click here for a free copy!). But only if you want to be ruined for regular life. 🙂

For today, will you please watch this video (all the way to the end!), and share your thoughts with us. Let’s prepare our hearts together … {Thanks for watching, and reading.}