When you’re on the third day of blizzarding that’s got your local main highway closed for, yep, the third day, and now they’re calling for more snow coming, as we ring in the new year, the whole bunch of you can’t help but think: “When is this all finally going to turn around?”
The Christmas tree’s still up and twinkling bravely on here. The house is still chock-full of kids and family come home for Christmas, and the stovetop’s still keeping the big pots of soup simmering on. A rotation of games keeps the invitations for more to come to the table for yet another rowdy round. I’ve still got the candles lit in the middle of the table, in the middle of these 12 days of Christmas. We’re still singing Christmas carols after every meal. The calendar year is freshly turned, and, yeah, honestly, right about now, wherever we are, who doesn’t need all the things to turn around?
For the weather to turn around, for the news to turn around, for all the things to turn around this coming new year. For this habit and those numbers to finally take a turn. For that hard, tender relationship to take a surprising turn for the better, for the story we never wanted to end up miraculously turning around. For that Hard Thing that seems, for all intents and purposes, to be painfully impossible, to actually… supernaturally… take a turn for good …
For all our old ways and all our hearts and all of tender humanity, to all just, somehow, this new year, to finally turn around.
If we’ve already got the wonder of Christmas in our rearview mirror, we run the real risk of thinking any New Year change is only found in that face who looks back at us in our mirror.
Right from the very beginning, especially at the beginning of a New Year– isn’t that what we’ve all been looking for: The Great Turn Around.
Because when we look back at this past year – haven’t all of our stories been just a tad bit messy and complicated and kinda heartbreaking in all kinds of unexpected ways? All of our stories have ended up turning some unbelievably painful and unwanted pages.
I mean, right from the very beginning of time, it’s always been this way: The whole story of God is a story of fractured families and struggling sojourners and people getting it wrong who really wanted to get it all right. Turn the pages of God’s story and what you see are all these stories of people whose story didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped or planned.
Like Joseph, who imagined a gloriously radiant life in full-color, yet ends up bruised, at the bottom of some pit, pawned off and trafficked to a foreign land and tossed into prison, forgotten for years. Moses gives up everything to lead God’s people, only to end up rebuked and dying alone, staring out at the Promised Land that he never got to enter. Rebekah lived with a locked womb for too long. Elizabeth wore the word “disgrace” like a scar. Job’s heart explodes in grief when he loses all 10 of his cherished children in a single day. David turns to God and beg-prays himself right hoarse, only to end up burying his beloved baby boy. Hannah wept aching tears, year after year, and Leah and Rachel, two sisters, turned their longing for family into a feuding, nasty rivalry, and Tamar was violated and dismissed.
Honestly, God could have begun the story of humanity with:
Once upon a time beyond time….. and then, Our Good God, He could have only told the good side of humanity’s stories.
If we’re struggling to sustain the celebration of Christ coming for the 12 days of Christmas, by the time New Year’s rung in, we risk thinking that it’s actually our own willpower that has to sustain the change of the new year.
But our God’s never turned away from any of the pages in our stories that are messier than we imagined – but He turns toward us all, and all our New Years can hold a Great Turn Around for each of us, because Christmas has already come first, because the Creator of the Cosmos, He pulled on skin, and entered into time as a babe laid down in a feeding trough, and The Great Turn Around of everything, everywhere, begins.
The calendar page’s freshly turned, and I haven’t yet turned off the Christmas lights, and that’s just where my thoughts keep turning:
If we’ve already got the wonder of Christmas in our rearview mirror, we run the real risk of thinking any New Year change is only found in that face who looks back at us in our mirror.
If we’ve already packed up the revolutionary meaning of Christmas, to rush on to ring in the New Year and all our new resolutions — we risk thinking our New Year, and all our new habits, can turn around, because of our own grit, our own strength, our own will.
How many years has that been my story?
If we’re struggling to sustain the celebration of Christ coming for the 12 days of Christmas, by the time New Year’s rung in, we risk thinking that it’s actually our own willpower that has to sustain the change of the new year.
But at the end of this year, I found myself quietly lingering in a different way, and purposing to celebrate all 12 days of Christmas, all of Christmastide – and that is what is powerfully turning some interior tide.
There’s only hope of a new us, when we keep opening to Christ in us.
Because what I’m deeply entering into and discovering is: If we are still in the midst of Christmastide, still celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, when we ring in the New Year, we are more aware that Christ is the King who’s come to turn around the cosmos, turn around the New Year, turn all our hearts and all our habits right around, and that it’s Christ who’s the only One with the power and strength to turn around all our wills, our ways, and the whole, old world.
There’s only hope of a new us, when we keep opening to Christ in us.
The downward movement of God into skin, comes to powerfully move us, and all humanity, upward into the life of God.
And when we are still celebrating the 12 days of Christmas when the New Year begins, we’re still situated in the story of Mary and Joseph and the King-Babe who isn’t afraid to enter our muck and our mire to turn everything around. We’re still hearing echoes of Mary’s song, Mary who heard the angel’s miraculous announcement that she would be a womb for God. And as Mary runs to visit her relative, Elizabeth, it’s the pregnant Mary who sings what is really the very first Christmas Carol ever, her praise to God, and it’s that First Christmas Carol that’s really a song of The Great Turn Around:
“And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior… He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts… he has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things…. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy…” (Luke 1)
Strikingly, that’s what Mary’s singing in that very first Christmas carol:
Christmas is utterly revolutionary. And only Christ coming to us, and His power, can revolutionize and turn around our New Year.
Those who humbly know how much help they need, are the ones who are lifted up.
That’s the refrain of Mary’s Christmas carol:
Those who proudly think they can do it on their own, find themselves scattered and brought down…
Those who humbly know how much help they need, are the ones who are lifted up.
Those who see themselves as mighty and capable, are upended… and those who feel empty and hungry and are seeking, find themselves fulfilled with good things… a good, fulfilling life.
The Great Turn Around we are all looking for when the calendar page turns to the New Year, it actually begins not on January 1st, but at Christmas: God breaks into time, and His setting-right love breaks into this world, and The Great Turn Around isn’t merely about the down and out trading places with the upper crust and the powerful, but rather, Christmas starts a revolution that turns against old, broken systems and ushers in new ways, and new systems, and wholly new hearts beating out a new way of being, in the new Upside-down Kingdom.
If we’re still bravely celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, and how utter revolutionary Christmas is, when, on the 8th day of Christmas, we ring in the New Year, then we can celebrate that it is actually the power of Christ alone who can revolutionize our New Year, that it’s the King who has come who turns everything in our tender lives and hearts right around.
We don’t have to strive to climb up anything, but rather God gave up everything and comes down…. to pick us all right up.
What gives our New Year any hope of turning around is the reality that it is Christmas, with the coming of Jesus, that starts this great, radical revolution-– where the downward movement of God into skin, comes to powerfully move us, and all humanity, upward into the life of God.
The only hope for our New Year resolutions, is that Christmas and Christ’s coming is what starts a revolution: God comes down into our messy conditions, so we can be lifted up into redeemed, and restored, and restory-ing conditions.
Our New Year holds great possibility only because The Great Turn Around of Christmas says: We don’t have to strive to climb up anything, but rather God gave up everything and comes down…. to pick us all right up.
What you can give Him is your heart – and He, in turn – He gives you a whole new heart. New heart, new desires, new will, aligned with His.
Though the candles here keep burning lower, I keep the Christmas carols playing. And I sing that, as I watch the snow keep falling across the fields, as I watch the New Year comes up over the horizon:
“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone…
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”
That’s the ultimate gift of Christmas, that completely changes our New Year:
What you can give Him is your heart – and He, in turn – He gives you a whole new heart.
Jesus came not to just be invited into a corner of your heart – but to give you a completely new heart, a new person, and an all encompassing new way of being.
New heart, new desires, new will, aligned with His.
It’s your Christmas that whispers right now to your New Year:
Jesus came not to just be invited into a corner of your heart – but to give you a completely new heart, a new person, and an all encompassing new way of being.
The epiphany is: Jesus didn’t come to just do a quick fixer upper of your heart, nor just to do a mini-renovation of the rooms and lines of your tender story; The Great Turn Around is that Jesus came down for us to come close, and give Him our whole heart – and He, in turn, gives us His own pure, holy Heart… to turn our whole lives right around.
The candles are burning low, but burning even brighter.
The Real Turn Arounds in our lives are never fueled by upward mobility, or keeping up to anyone else’s standard, or finally being impressive.
The Real Turn Arounds, the ones that actually last, are always, always, always formed by downward mobility and going lower, with honest, needy humility, and daily being sacrificial.
It’s Christ’s coming, that starts the actual revolution – that alone can give any hope to our New Year and any of our resolutions.
When our stories don’t go the way we imagined – we get to go to God, who is the Way, and is writing a more powerful, hopeful, meaningful story than we could ever possibly imagine.
That’s the hope of our New Year: When our stories don’t follow the script – we get the opportunity to more intimately follow God and His revolutionary script.
Because Christmas is about how God came down, everyone who has ever felt overwhelmed or let down, or discouraged, or a bit hopeless, or just really left behind, gets to experience the New Year’s Great Turn Around. God comes down to take hold of us and reverse the direction of everything, and turn all the hopeless things all around.
It’s still Christmas (the 9th day of Christmas!), and it’s Christ’s coming, that starts the actual revolution – that alone can give any hope to our New Year and any of our resolutions.
Because Love came down — everything can now start to turn around.
Keeping Christ at the Center of your year is What Has the Power to Radically Change your year, Your Heart & Whole Life
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