Holiday Hustle

** O LORD, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things; thy counsels of old are faithfulness and truth. ** Isaiah 25:1

December. Days filled with decorating our homes, shopping for gifts and making traditional family dishes. If you are like me, you go into Holiday Hustle Mode and just keep moving until everything is done.

But as I spent a good portion of yesterday and most of this morning working on Christmas “magic”, the Lord brought to mind this verse in Isaiah.

I have to admit that I did not spend hardly any time or barely a word exalting, or praising the Lord out loud in the last 24 hours. I do remember that in my conversations with my husband we both spent time thanking the Lord for His goodness to us. But that is about all. Most of the day was about me and what I wanted and how I wanted it.

Being focused isn’t a bad thing, of course. But I feel like I have relegated my time for the Lord to a very small corner of my days during the early days of this season. Which is silly since the season is supposed to be about Him!

When we tell ourselves that the Lord is our God, we should show it in some way or another all the time. So, I am challenging myself to be more conscious of Him throughout this month of busyness. I hope to take more time to just stop and thank Him for every little gift that I see around me. After 42 years of marriage, our home is filled with the Lord’s kindness to us….

We have photos on the walls of our children and our grandchildren. We have furniture that is not falling apart. We have a rug under our feet to help keep the cold, tile floors from freezing our toes. We have a bathtub for hot baths and a shower for hot showers. Indoors. I don’t have to go out by the barn to shower 🙂 (Nor do I have a barn 🙂 )..

The Lord has given my husband and I, a new life, a new purpose and a new marriage. He has changed our priorities and blessed us beyond description. Our closets and our refrigerator are both as full as we want them to be.

I think I may have mentioned in other posts, that we have had several personal encounters with refugees in the past months. Each one has been a lovely person, living in crisis and spending their entire days trying to rebuild their lives. They are in desperate search for warm clothing, blankets and enough food to survive. They have no jobs or the jobs they have found are ones where they are not treated well. They are being taken advantage of. They are running out of organizations that can help them with food and clothing. They are humbled and they are humiliated by their circumstances. They are… without hope.

Working with them, and trying to relieve what we can of their suffering has made us appreciate much more the rich life that we have and all that the Lord has faithfully done for us. His ** counsels of old have been faithful and true. ** He has kept His promises to never forsake us, no matter where on the planet we are. He has taken our cares that we have cast upon Him and He has helped us out of our troubles and healed our wounds.

It is hard for all of us to not get buried in the many tasks of the Holidays. But, we can take a few minutes each day, before, during or after each task and remember the little things that the Lord has done for each of us. Doing this, just a couple of times, these past couple of days has helped me to be more in the ‘spirit’ of Christmas and less in misery of the Holiday Hustle. Let’s use those little extra minutes while waiting to pay for our purchases, or sitting in holiday traffic jams to declare to ourselves and to others that yes, **Lord, thou art my God**…and yes, He has **done wonderful things** for us all.