Giving Good Gifts

I started Christmas shopping today.  I always get excited about this task every year, because I love selecting or making things for loved ones that I know they will really enjoy.  However, it's hard because no tangible thing can possibly express my love and appreciation for my family and close friends.  Especially now that I have a man in my life whom I love more than I can express, it is impossible to find a gift that adequately expresses my love.

(One of my favorite Christmastime stories expresses this dilemma very beautifully and poignantly.  If you've never read O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, click on this link and read the short story. :) )

This evening, I realized, that God's gift to us on Christmas was the ultimate expression of ultimate love.  As much as I love my family and adore my fiancée, God loves his children even more, with a love that is beyond human expressing.  It is not, however, beyond God-expressing, and he expressed this love by sending his only, beloved, Son, Jesus Christ, to this world to be its Savior.  Thirty years later, God allowed his Son to take the punishment for the sins of the whole world, so that that world might be saved.

If anyone has fully expressed his love in a gift, it was God in the gift of that tiny baby lying in a manger.  I wonder if Mary and Joseph realized just how much it meant for their eternal lives that little Jesus was born that night.  Did Mary know that her baby was her Savior and her God?  I think she probably did.  Maybe it wasn't so real then, with the exhaustion from the birth, the brand-new infant lying in the hay.  Maybe she wondered what God was thinking, sending his Son to such a poor place.  But then, that's what God's all about: coming to us in our most humble state, and raising us up.  His name, after all, is Emmanuel: God with us.

The Bible talks about how God loves to give good gifts to his children.  His Son was the ultimate gift.  But he blesses us every day in countless ways: through our homes that protect us, through our clothes that cover and warm us, through our food that sustains us, through our jobs through which we support our families, through our loved ones who bless us as we bless them.

God gives us so much.  And I think it's that spirit of giving that we try to express, in some small way, at Christmas, by giving gifts to each other.  They represent the love we have for each other, just as that baby in the manger is the personification of God's love for us.

I am looking forward to giving gifts to my loved ones this Christmas.  But I think, more than ever before, I am going to realize just how much God gives me good gifts.  Besides the gifts of Jesus and forgiveness, my most precious gifts are my fiancée, my family, and my friends.  Thank you, God, for all you have given me!