I am sure everyone reading this, myself included, has to some extent a list of things to do in preparation for Christmas. Gifts to purchase and wrap, ingredients for celebration dinners, a schedule of when to see friends and family and items to be hung and placed to decorate our homes in festive fashion. Prayerfully, some are even planning on going to a Christmas Eve service at church as well.

I wonder though, if it would be more pleasing to Jesus Christ, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate, if we made a different kind of list. A list of things to do inspired by Jesus and the story of His birth at Christmas for after Christmas and throughout the coming year.  

Donations to give to those in need, acts of random kindness to perform, folks to reconnect or even reconcile with, organizing priorities around our spiritual life and, through our relationship with God, fill our role as called in God’s plan to save humanity through the death and resurrection of that baby boy born on Christmas night.  

It would be a daunting list to write and an even more challenging list to complete. However, I cannot help but think that it would not only be more pleasing to God than completing that list of things to do for Christmas, but that it would bring us a great deal more joy and fulfillment than any other list of things to do we will ever write.

— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Jeff Meyer is the pastor of Monroe United Methodist Church.