Did you have a perfect Christmas?
As moms, we work hard to make the holidays “perfect.” Into our already crazy busy routines, we squeeze in hours of shopping for the right gifts, menu planning, cooking, baking, cleaning, wrapping… Exhausting, isn’t it? And for the Schairer family, taking and then mailing out the perfect Christmas family photo. It was beautiful this year. Everyone dressed in their Christmas best, looking at the camera and smiling pretty.
But Christmas 2017 was not perfect around our house. My husband contracted “the plague” and was sick his entire 10 day respite from work. There were fights over new toys. There was crabbiness and whining (and much of it on my part, not just the kids).
And that “perfect” family photo? Well, it was doctored. I’m admitting it here. Our photographer did a face swap. You know, in one photo, children #1 and #2 are pointed the right direction, but #3 is looking away. In another photo, #1 and #3 are smiling, but #2 is scowling. (She did a lot of scowling, as you can see from the outtakes). So the photographer worked some photoshop magic, and voila! Everyone appearing to cooperate and looking happy about it.
Our “perfect” family photo was an illusion. As was our “perfect” Christmas holiday. How about yours? Are you going back to the daily grind of school, work, routine, feeling that this holiday season was not all it could and should have been? I know I am. But then I remember.
I remember what happened on Christmas. God came into our very imperfect world to do a life swap.
Jesus came to be perfect in my place. He cooperated fully with everything God wanted him to do. Everything God demands, but I cannot fulfill. And he always had the right attitude while doing everything right, all the time. After a life of true perfection, the life swap he was determined to accomplish led him to the cross. There, he took on himself all my imperfection, and paid for it, erasing all the ugly in God’s eyes. When God looks at me, he sees none of my failures, and all of the good that Jesus did during his time here on earth. God sees…perfection. He declares me perfect.
A face swap gave me the “perfect” family photo. Jesus’ life swap gives me a deep, true, lasting purity. An eternal perfection.
Because of Jesus, I did have a perfect Christmas. And I didn’t have to lift a finger for it. In fact, I had a perfect 2017–no fights, no fits of selfishness, no whining about the little people (or big people) that God has put in my life, or the tasks that he allows me to do each day.
Simply perfection. A clean past. And, in Christ who has already earned it for me, a perfect 2018.
