Free For All Friday – Advent Devotion for Christmas Eve

First, I want to say, thank you, Barb Anderson, for inviting me to write a devotional for Christmas Eve. From the start, I thought, “Piece of cake, this will be easy!”

After all, Christmas Eve, conjures up and sparkles joyfully with one thought or one image after another! It’s like a train speeding off its tracks with so many ideas!! Angels and evergreens, stockings and shopping, cards and candles, ornaments and toys, carols and cookies, Lovefeast and lights, parties and pinecones, Christmas stories and more…Sleighbells ringing, children singing, jingle bells are coming to town, thumpety thump, thump, look at Santa fly!

Barb, I thought this was going to be easy!?

Once the speeding train of thoughts derailed and the whirlwind of the anxious Christmas-push quieted down in my head, then the real thinking started settling in.

My thinking landed on the word EVE. I’m not thinking about Adam and Eve, though I am thinking about creation. I’m thinking about creation before Adam and Eve.

Oxford dictionary definition: eve is the period of time immediately before an event or occasion. Christmas Eve is immediately before Christmas. Our focus, planning, purchasing—all of those things previously mentioned—were all pointing to Christmas, not Christmas Eve. One last hurrah of all, of our preparations and celebrations—that’s where we land on Christmas Eve, but it’s still not yet Christmas. All this effort and we’re not yet there; we are still trying to get to Christmas.

My mind went to the view from the clouds, so to speak, more specifically, to the eve at the very beginning of creation. God did his work IN the eve…IN the chaos, the disorder, the darkness, the void. God spoke his light to best the darkness. God’s spirit took the upper hand over the chaos. God’s own, his very breath obliterated the nothingness with LIFE!!

God is with us.

God doesn’t wait until the morning comes; he comes in the eve. God enters our lives in our messiness, our chaos, our voids of distrust, loneliness, anxiety or fear. God finds us in the shadows of confusing darkness whenever we stumble in the period before the dawn comes.

And it was evening and it was morning the first day.

Merry Christmas dear friends.

Proverbs 3:5-6