Do something in your own life
that makes life better for others
Advent draws us closer and closer to the heart of the Christmas message: God comes to us always in small things and asks us to believe in our own smallness, as well.
In a society, wealthy as it is, where children go to bed hungry every night, in a country where violence is the drug of choice, in a world where people are used as pawns in the corporate power game, we are not here for nothing. Advent requires that we prepare to do some birthing of the reign of God on our own.
The temptation is to plead powerlessness, to argue for our distance from the issues, the information, the decisions. But it takes no power at all to ask company executives why children are working in sweatshops to make our clothes for pennies, 12 hours a day, at the age of seven.
It takes no power at all to serve at a soup kitchen. It takes no power at all to write a letter to the editor pointing out the disparities of the local budget or the lack of day care centers or the need for free clinics in the town as well as medical insurance for children in the country.
The fact is the stables of the world still house children whom the Christ child came to raise to life. This time they stand at our door and beg for shelter. We are the people being asked to take them into our minds and hearts and souls. We are not here for nothing.
Commitment is the willingness to do something in our own lives that makes life better for others, whatever our smallness, however remote we feel from the problem.
Commitment has nothing to do with our power. It has to do with our willingness. In fact, God always chooses the little ones – the Bethlehems and the Marys – for life’s great new tasks. Because they are mighty? No, precisely because they are not.
In them, in us, God’s presence is more magnified. If God is with even us, if God can do great things through us, God can indeed do anything-and we can do anything, too.
Maybe the merriest Christmas we could ever have will be the year we remember again what Christmas is supposed to be about.
Christmas is not about getting, it’s about giving the world a glimpse of what the Christ Child would really look like if we ever allowed him to be born in us. (From “Sparks of Advent Light” by Joan Chittister, Benetvision 2008).
