How long does it take you to get ready for a night in?
And how long does it take you to get ready for Christmas? If I lay all the sermon and service preparation on one side, it probably takes me about an hour and a half, but I stagger that through the year, mostly in the January sales.
In aid of present-choosing, I once asked a primary school what I could buy my mum for Christmas. Bearing in mind they'd never met her, their answers indicated either:
- what they thought of me
- what they thought of their own mums
and a little bit of extrapolation outwards and upwards from there. The two answers they came up with were:
- some bling
- and a motorbike.
Go figure. They didn't get that off me. It has left me with an enduring vision of my mum tearing up the streets of the West Midlands, cheap white gold trailing behind her in her windy slipstream.
My mum's stunt double, yesterday.
(note to self: Wendy Slipstream would be a great name for a baby)
Anyway. When I kidded the little guys that I'd leave off the present-choosing until Boxing Day and call in at a garage and buy her some out-of-date flowers and a bag of briquettes, they were under-impressed. Underwhelmed. I got them to voice their disapproval quite loudly and then I promised I'd spend more time getting ready, and that this might indicate to my lovely old mum how valued she actually was.
And of course that led to wondering just how long God had spent preparing the first Christmas for us.
On the evidence of Mary having a nipper, nine months is a good starting guess. That would be the equivalent of putting the lights up in March, so God is already beating us (unless you've left those lights on your house front up all year. You did? Stop it. Stop it now).
On the evidence of John the Baptist, you need to add another three months in there, so God started preparing this time last year.
But then call in the prophets, those people pointing forward to God piercing the shroud of darkness that had enfolded the world since our immersion in sin had broken our friendship with God. Call in the prophets, and suddenly you're looking at 750 or more years of preparation. God has put some serious time into this enterprise.
And finally (for now) call in Adam and Eve, mythical or not, and the writer of Genesis, who report that the self-same day that the Eden-based serpent-inspired apple-scrumping took place, before the sun had set on the first sin, God was telling his two favourite human beings that one day the serpent would be crushed underfoot. It's the earliest promise that a Saviour is coming, and it's thousands of years before the years BC tipped over into AD-ness.
That's a long time to be preparing Christmas. Longer than even the best-steeped Christmas cake. But a plan that long in the making, a plan that took such action, such finessing, so many angels and babies and a star, so many hints throughout history… this smacks of better preparation than any of my Christmases or nights out. And so it points to how much love God must have for the intended beneficiaries (i.e. us) of his planning ahead.
Gotta love someone who could spend so many years - and all the minutes involved - paving the way for us to be saved from sin and guilt and ourselves and the devil.
And so, how long will you take putting up a tree? Wrapping presents? Defrosting a turkey under the hot shower? Finding a clean pair of pants?
And how long will you take preparing to listen to and talk to the God who spent thousands of years preparing it all for you?
Defrost your heart now.
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