Waiting to Worship

Someday I will have a family that all goes to church on Christmas Eve. Someday Christmas Day will be an all day event. Someday we will worship our King before we open presents. Someday my children will have traditions to write about. Someday Christmas will be about Christ in my house.

So until then Christmas Eve services are a solo event, Christmas is an hour of opening gifts, and it's the most important part. Until then I have my own traditions (The Nativity Story and hot chocolate). And for now Jesus's birth is the reason I celebrate, even when it's not why my family is celebrating.

It's easy for me to think of the someday. Thinking of that verse "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" and waiting patiently to have a home of my own. A home that will serve the Lord.

But as it turns out I don't know when that someday might come. Or what plans God has for me and any future household I might have. And regardless of if it's soon or fifteen years from now, I am not there quite yet. I am here. I am in a home of this world.

I often find myself waiting to worship.

Not only in regards to Christmas, but in life itself. Since the ninth grade I have struggled to run after Jesus before I go to camp, constantly thinking camp will bring everything together. I wait until Sundays or Wednesdays. I wait. I always have an excuse…..there's no time, no place. I'm too tired, too hungry, too unfocused, too uncomfortable.

Someday my whole house will find Jesus to be the focus of our Christmas.

But that Jesus will be no different from the Jesus I find in my current solo worship.

The Bible often tell us not to wait to worship. In most of his Psalms David worships, even if God seems silent. The shepards immediately left their flocks to find the Savior. Jesus tells men who want to bury their father or say goodbye to their family that they must not look back, to follow him immediately. Paul and Peter never waited to spread the Gospel, but went even amongst danger and prosecution.

Our God does not wait to save us. Any "waiting" we do is His will, and He does not draw lines. I wait until a family, camp, a Sunday morning. Small, insignificent things. God does not wait for us to reach a certain point of "good" or to complete certain things. Jesus is not a checklist.

I am learning not to wait. To know that my God is present here and now. That I am loved and adored exactly where I'm at. Merry Christmas! Jesus has been born, and He came as a child to save the world in the way only our God could.

Immanuel, God with us, is here. Now. So come, let us adore Him.