Already???
November 7, 2013
It happened on Tuesday, October 29th. I know for sure the time and date because I left Bible study and headed straight to Wal-mart to get the “stuff” to make my daughter’s Halloween costume. (If you are curious, she went as a Pinterest board. Cheap! Easy! Adorable!) After gathering the supplies, I had a momentary surge of holiday goodwill and thought I would trek across the store to get the ingredients to make sugar cookies. (If you are curious, it was a bag mix and canned icing. Cheap! Easy! What 12 year-old knows the difference?)
There on the “Seasonal” aisle, right past the marshmallow bats and chocolate eyeballs, it happened. I fell into the Seasonal Wasteland. On both sides of the aisle were a few empty shelves. Behind me, Halloween. In front of me, Christmas. A tiny little bit of my holiday spirit died. (Ok, quite a bit of it died, but I did still make the cookies.)
With Halloween not even behind me on the calendar and Thanksgiving nowhere in sight, Christmas marched right onto center stage. Later that day when I got home, I had an email that reminded me how many days til Christmas. I was surrounded and more of my already wounded holiday spirit fell ill.
It’s quite possible there are some people out there that don’t get overwhelmed with the idea of Christmas. I’m not one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I love the reason for the season but there’s a lot of pressure associated with the season that has nothing to do with the reason!
But isn’t pressure the case all year ‘round now? Don’t we have calendars for our calendars? Don’t we have events scheduled for months in advance weekdays and weekends? Can you even remember the last day you slept late (on purpose) or made pancakes in your pajamas? We are busy. In fact, we are Crazy Busy.
We live and breathe by schedules that rule our lives and we are stressed. Recent studies have suggested that overscheduled kids lead of over anxious adults. It’s not surprising but this is how we live, right? But is this how we have to live? Is this God’s plan for our lives?
With the holiday season approaching, our November book is not a book about being thankful or cultivating more gratitude, it’s a challenge to examine your life. Kevin DeYoung’s newest release Crazy Busy addresses the way we are spending our lives. As one reviewer noted, “Our busyness can be evidence of our faithfulness or, on the other hand, evidence of our pride, ambition, and unbridled activity.”
We hope you will grab a copy of Crazy Busy (It’s available all the usual places) and read along with us. As the subtitle says, it’s a “mercifully short book about a really big problem”. (ct)