CHRISTMAS AT THE MOVIES | A Christmas Carol
Read | 2 Corinthians 4:17-18
I love this Advent season, I love Thanksgiving and being together with family. I love the lead up to Christmas with decorations, lights, good food, hot chocolate and I even love Christmas shopping. For many people it is easy to be hopeful in this Christmas season, but for others it is difficult to be hopeful at any time of the year. It totally depends on your circumstances. Hope is a funny thing, it is our expectation of something or our desire for something to happen. Hope can come and go pretty easily.
A year ago my family and I had been waiting for 3 years for our son Firaol to come home from Ethiopia, and in November we were told that it would not be happening. Things felt pretty hopeless at this time last year. However, by spring it began to look like we would be able to complete our adoption and hope began to build again.
This week we’re taking a look at the movie A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge seems to be someone who doesn’t have a lot of hope in his life. He’s selfish and has no real personal connections. His old business partner has died, he doesn’t have any friends. The guy who works for him isn’t really a friend and still treats Scrooge better than he is treated by him. But once Scrooge is visited by the Christmas Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future he realizes that he needs to make some changes in his life. He needs to let hope into his life and then spread it into the lives of others. At the end of the movie no one can even recognizes Ebenezer Scrooge because he is such a different person. He has a sense of hope.
Jesus gives us this same hope. We may feel like hope can come and go pretty easily, but that’s only if we take our eyes off of Jesus. 2 Corinthians 4:18 tells us we should fix our eyes on Jesus not on the circumstances around us. Jesus can give us hope here on earth but also into the future when we will spend eternity in heaven. If we look around to the stuff here on earth, we can lose hope really fast. If we look to money there might be a time when it runs out, if we look to a friend there might be a time they aren’t there for us and if we look to our health what happens when it fails. The only way we can truly have hope is by looking to Jesus and the hope that he gives us. I think that’s why it can seem a little easier to have hope during this advent season, because we are looking to Jesus coming into this world and bringing us the “thrill of hope” in this holiday season.
This year is full of hope for my family, our son has been home for 6 months and we are enjoying every bit of all new traditions for him and our family, first thanksgivings, cutting Christmas trees, decorating, making a Christmas list, and experiencing advent. Praying your family experiences the hope that comes from Jesus this Christmas Season.
Reflect | What are the temporary places you tend to look for Hope?
