Finding the Gospel in My Christmas Card Chaos

Looking for Perfection

It was November 3 — a Monday. A cool breeze coursed through the air and the neighborhood smorgasbord of Michael Myers statues and 12-foot inflatable skeletons were replaced by holly jolly blow-up reindeer. Bright yellow bulbs lined the rooftops and the faint whispers of Christmas spirit warmed our weary hearts.

My phone pinged with an email from Walgreens: 70% off holiday cards. I thought back to that weekend’s iPhone photo shoot, where I donned the boys in black and green and headed toward the piece of foliage that most resembled a pine tree. My friend Amanda snapped iPhone photos in portrait mode, while my little sister, Christen, performed ridiculous stunts with a stuffed donkey to get my boy, and my husband Joe, to smile.

My camera roll was stocked with several dozen pictures, so I began my search for the one — that perfect picture to serve as the centerpiece of this year’s Christmas card. Much to my dismay, nothing seemed to have what I was looking for. My nose was a little too scrunched, Luke’s socks were slipping off his minivan feet, and there was not a picture that Joe and I both felt equally excited about. This is certainly no offense to our photography team — they told me time and again to stop scrunching my nose, and adjusted Luke’s socks at every intermission. Once it became clear that no filter would fix our flaws, I resigned myself to second best and began perusing the thousands of Walgreens templates with a small list of must-haves: not too cluttered, no biblical heresy, must mesh well with black and green.

But by the time I had decided on a photo and a template, Luke was awake, and his affinity for banging on computer keys makes any sort of design work a difficult task. I hurriedly clicked send before the discount expired and my son slammed his hands on the keys once again.

The next day rolled around and I figured that I might as well pick up my Christmas cards. I’ve never been one to procrastinate, so nearly two months in advance seemed like an appropriate time to check that off my list. While expectations were not sky-high (considering the scrunched nose and sliding socks), I certainly never expected to come face to face with a menacing little black-ink backslash written just below our name.

I gasped. I couldn’t believe my carelessness. I could already see the headlines: Hypocritical Former English Teacher who Mandated Proofreading Sends Out Christmas Cards with Unwanted Backslash. My mind raced with what to do next — burn the stack? Abandon Christmas altogether? Turn that tragic typo into a tiny snowflake? Every option seemed both daunting and discouraging. In my heart, I knew there was a dark stain so deeply burned into that card that I could do absolutely nothing to fix. It was going to need to be completely remade.

Grace in Imperfection

Then I paused: Wait — that’s the gospel. That’s why Jesus came! The entire meaning of Christmas is bound up in this beautiful truth: We were so deeply stained by sin that we could do nothing to save ourselves, nothing to remove the wickedness within. We needed to be completely remade. We needed a Savior to come into the world and pay the penalty we could not pay.

Our sin is not some secret blemish that can be quickly covered up and poof! Problem solved. It’s not even a mere stain on our otherwise-tidy resumes. It is a deeply-rooted rebellion, a disease, a devastating chasm between us and our Holy God. It’s not something we can turn into a snowflake, so to speak. It’s something deserving of death.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23

But we are not left helpless! Jesus — the perfect Son of God — left Heaven’s throne to be born as a baby who would live sinlessly among scoffers, submit to the will of his Father, and sacrifice his very life to pay for the sins of the world. It is only through him that we can be saved. We must confess that we are sinners rendered completely incapable of doing anything to escape our fallen condition. And we must cling for dear life to the righteous robe of precious Jesus who said on the cross, “It is finished.” And we must let him make us completely new.

I look at that backslash now and I smile. I think of King Jesus, knowing my sin was so bad that he had to die for me, but his love was so deep that he was glad to do so. What a Savior. What a God.

So I’ll send out the Christmas cards, typo and all. I’ll look upon that ugly stain of a slash and I’ll celebrate the Savior who saw my sin-stained self and washed me white as snow. This is the meaning of Christmas.