By Madi Franks, Student Writer
My favourite place in the world to be has always been in the living room of my childhood home on Christmas Eve. There was this orange shag carpet from the 70s that we never got rid of and walls of wooden panelling everywhere. Lamps were scattered around in the absence of an overhead light and, come December (or November if I had any say in the matter), the Christmas tree went up. There is something about string lights that penetrates more than just my eyes but goes straight to my heart. Christmas decorations, for me, are akin to being hugged from the inside out. I love orange garlands and wreaths and stars and how the secular world seems to embrace a celebration that finds its origins in the birth of the God who loved His people enough to become one of them.
One of the reasons I so deeply enjoy Christmas decorations is because of their focus on light. In the otherwise total-darkness of a living room without an overhead illumination, eyes are drawn to the flecks of light scattered over a tree or across a mantle. This focus on light that Christmas brings conjures very tangible images in my mind of what it is that happens when that God I mentioned above makes His home within the confines of a person’s heart.
I close my eyes and see Jesus hanging up twinkling lights, using all the rough edges of my heart to hold them up. I see Him lighting candles and dancing in the flickering shadows the flames cast. I see Him preparing the guest bedroom with the good quilts so that we would be ready to host other people. I see Him taking baked orange slices out of the oven and threading them together until the string is long enough to reach across the wall. He does everything needed to be done to a space in order to turn it into a home; and it is this space He makes fit for His very self to indwell.
In the seventeenth century, priest and poet George Herbert penned two sister poems about the birth of Christ, aptly entitled Christmas I and Christmas II. The former closes with a plea from Herbert to the Christ he adores as he petitions: “Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have / A better lodging than a rack or grave.” Upon reading this poem for the first time, I thought of the famous carol Deck the Halls whose opening line compels singers to take boughs of holly and deck their halls with them. What a wonderful thing it is that when Jesus enters a person’s life, He decks the halls of their heart for them!
Upon entering in, Christ gets to work with His broom and mop bucket; He clears away the cobwebs from the corners of a heart that has not been used very much lately; He takes out the trash and dusts the surfaces and then gets busy filling the room with every good thing to replace all the bad ones He got rid of. He does indeed furnish one’s soul with all the things required for abundant living. He does indeed deck one’s soul to the end that this King would have a lodging that no longer resembles a grave.
The Christian person’s life is filled with anticipatory waiting for this God to come back again to furnish and deck the world in the same manner He did our hearts. Advent is a reflection of this; a waiting-filled month of longing and not-knowing, of anticipation growing, of the hope that as we let our hearts prepare Him room, He would come near, He would come in, and He would take over to continue the process of furnishing and decking until the day He comes back again.
