Disappointed with Christmas

So we had a tremendous Christmas--full of family, food, and gifts galore. But one of my kids is particularly sensitive to the anticipation and the hype of just about anything...and as my wife Kelly wisely pointed out afterward, it's impossible for Christmas to ever fully live up to all the build-up.

So we've been trying to help our child process being disappointed with Christmas. And that's brought up a number of conflicting thoughts.

On the one hand, the conventional response is the old "count your blessings" angle. We want to develop a heart in all three of our children that is grateful for what's been received, not one that is always clamoring for more.

And this is crucial for anyone. A heart that does not know gratitude cannot know Jesus.

But as I've been thinking about this, there's an additional parenting response that I'm considering: the affirmation and even celebration of disappointment.

The simple reality is that all of life has elements of disappointment. Our distant ancestors forfeited the possibility of ever being fully satiated when they rebelled against God and said they wanted to be like Him.

So life here in the Land of the Ruins disappoints. And that disappointment is designed to remind us that we aren't built for life in the Land of the Ruins. We were made to delight in the land of the Trinity, the Edenic paradise created just for us to tend and to love and to encounter God face to face.

Given that we don't live there any more I want to cultivate, both in myself and in my kids, a holy discontent with life here. I want it to be built around the reality that nothing here satisfies. Some day, by God's grace, all five of us will know full and final satisfaction.

But until that day, the post-Christmas disappointment can serve as a good reminder (if it is steered correctly) towards our created desire for the Creator who gave us the initial desire for total fulfillment.

"Thou hast mad us for thyself. And our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee," Augustine wrote. I pray for wisdom to try not to tame the restless heart with anything less glorious than the risen Christ and the hope that we have in him.

In the mean time if you've still got the tree up, time to take it down, yo. For some of you, the final redemption of all things will include Christmas carols and decorations that are up interminably. For the rest of us, we're ready for the new year....or at least we like to think so.