This Christmas is different!  Rushed, unsettled, busy, it’s just different.  I know the Christmas season is usually like that, but this year it is just different.  Maybe because we just moved to a new city, I’ve started a new job, moved into a new home and new neighborhood, a different place to walk my dogs, this is different.

I know in time I will get used to the new home and the new job.  I know I will become more familiar with my new neighborhood and my new church community.  I will get into a new routine every morning and find a new taqueria that I can go and get breakfast.  But right now…it all feels very different for me.  I guess change does that to you.  I guess as I get older I want to be surrounded by familiar things: the same place, the same dog walking path, the same friends, and the same comfortable surroundings.  There is nothing wrong with wanting the same things, but there are times in our lives when God wants to bring change and He wants to bring difference.  He wants change in our life so that we will be an agent of change in others.  There are times He wants to use the change in our lives to help us refocus on Him, the constant, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

So many times we rely on other things to bring us peace and comfort and consistency, and when they are not there we lose our balance, or we lose our place.  When Jesus arrived that Christmas morning the Magi were asking “where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?”  Then it says, “when Herod heard this he was disturbed and all Jerusalem with him.”  When Christ invades our lives He will bring difference, He will bring change, and the life He has called us to live will be disturbing and unsettling for you and for others.

He never called us to a comfortable corner in the neighborhood, or a convenient place on the back pew, or to the same way we have always done it.  He called us to live a different life, a life that brings change and a new direction.  I am committed to living my life for Him, therefore, it is different, it is new, and that is just where God wants me to be.

Matthew 2:12 (NCV)

¹² But God warned the wise men in a dream not to go back to Herod, so they returned to their own country by a different way.