Christmas is Different This Time

My family has always loved Christmas. Growing up, all my mom's extended family would come together and spend the night at our house. I'll never forget when the heat went out and 12 of us spent Christmas Eve night sleeping around the fireplace. It's always

What gets lost in Christmas sometimes is that it's hard to point kids and teenagers towards Jesus. We get caught up in the gift giving and moving from house to house to see family. None of those things are inherently wrong, but I'm sure you've all thought one way or another about how to slow down Christmas and focus on what's important.

I now have kids, and Anna and I are starting to discuss what kind of family traditions we want to start. What do we want to do? How do we want to highlight the true meaning of Christmas? How do we make it less about gifts and more about Jesus?  

With that said, here are some ideas we've been talking about when it comes to making Christmas different for our families.

• Spend time together-Wake up Christmas morning and eat breakfast, then read the birth story in Matthew 2 and Luke 2 before opening gifts.
• Spend time together serving-Serve somewhere the week before. The Salvation Army and Helping Hands food pantry usually have trouble finding people to serve the week of Christmas. 
• Spend less-Give more gifts like letters, pictures, and handmade items.
• Give More-Find a organization that is doing something amazing and give to them. The Orchard will have a mission offering Christmas Eve night for their mission partner in Ecuador, Foundation Elohim. Because of our adoption and association with Ethiopia, we will probably also choose www.bringlove.in

These are just a few things we are doing this year. We'll spend plenty of time opening gifts, eating too much, and traveling from family to family to see grandparents and aunts and uncles, but we'll also look at Christmas as a time to point to the miracle of Jesus. 

What are you doing differently for Christmas this year?

The Zambia Project

The Zambia Project is a book I first learned of a year ago. It's the story of a former youth pastor who now works at a christian school in suburban Chicago called Wheaton Academy. Over the past decade, students at Wheaton Academy have raised money to support the small region Kakolo in Zambia. The region has been devastated by AIDS, and the average life expectancy is 37 years old. It has been an incredible journey where high school students have stepped up and raised over $100,000 a year consistently.

It's a fascinating read, but here's my favorite quote from the book:

I have come to believe with all of my heart that the best leadership development is accomplished when growing leaders actually have to lead something. I know that sounds far too simplistic, but my experience has taught me with high school and college students that unless they feel the weight of being in charge of something significant they will think they can lead something, but may never move to that place where they know they can lead something.

You see that? Often when we give people large chunks of responsibility, instead of shying away or backing down, they accomplish the thing they set out to do. Even teenagers.

This I think is the challenge for all of us. Parents, teachers, youth leaders, small group leaders. We all have a responsibility to our teenagers to find areas where they can significantly contribute to God's work in the world and give them the keys. In order for great things to happen, freedom must exist. And for true freedom to exist, we have to have the freedom to fail as well. My hope is our teenagers will be ones who go to college and become adults who know God can do things in the world through them because they've already seen it happen. They've lived it. They've known it.