How do we get ready for Christmas?

Ann Voskamp writes today,

Advent – this is the season of preparing that prepares us for any season of life — because we are preparing our lives for Christ to enter in — which prepares for us the life without end.

Is that the ultimate purpose of this life — the preparing for the next life?

Is this why Christmas, Advent, unlike any other time of year, glimmers with a glimpse of heaven — because it’s the time of year we’re fulfilling our purpose, preparing for Christ and His coming again?

The Christmas tree’s been lit for weeks, a beacon, a preparing, an anticipation.

Why is it easier to make Christmas cookies than to make our hearts ready for Christ?

Turning the calendar page to December doesn’t turn life into this dance of the sugarplum fairies.

Christ shied from the sanitized — He chose the dung heaps and entered in at our stinking places. Thank God. I need a God like that.

Our loving God always comes to us wrapped in the unlikely.

Is that how we get ready for Christmas? By readying the heart to receive the gift of every moment — no matter what the moment unexpectedly holds — as a gift of His love?