You know the feeling. You experienced it when you were a kid. The anticipation is over. The presents have been opened. The cousins aren’t coming over for hours and all those exciting gifts suddenly seem less, well, exciting. It’s 10 a.m. on Christmas morning and your expectations were so overblown, deflation was inevitable. Now what?
While, as adults, we may be better at handling the post-Christmas letdown, I think many of us still experience it. There’s so much planning, so much preparation, so much anticipation that the day can hardly live up to it all. The meal you slaved over is gone in 15 minutes. The gifts you anguished over are lying forgotten on the floor. The house you scrubbed from top to bottom looks like a holiday bomb detonated inside. And to top it all off, you have to get back to work.
What’s to be done? I was listening to a sermon on the radio last week and a line jumped out at me. It wasn’t even the central theme of the sermon. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: “God doesn’t need you to do anything for Him. He just wants you to worship Him.”
It brought me up short. How often do I imagine that I am busy going about the Lord’s work? My writing, my job in ministry, volunteering at church, helping family and neighbors . . . I do it all for God right? Well, I do. But not because He needs me to. God could get it all done without me–better, faster and perfectly. God doesn’t need me. But He does want me. He wants me so much that He invented me. And why did He invent me? So I could worship Him. Not so I could buy perfect gifts, cook perfect meals and decorate my house to impress–oops, I mean demonstrate my love for–family and friends.
So there’s the answer to the 10 a.m. Christmas morning feeling–quit trying to meet your own, myriad expectations and focus on God’s one expectation. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God.” I’ve quoted that often. But there’s more to the verse. It goes on to say, “I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.”
It’s the day after Christmas. Exalt Him.