Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum?

Christmas is over! For some of us that is a statement of relief and for others it is a statement of sadness. For me it is a little bit of both. My favorite songs during Christmas include songs like Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and White Christmas. I enjoy singing those songs and listening to them. They bring back many childhood memories and several of them are good ways to worship God and remember what Christmas is really all about, the birth of Jesus. My favorite song after Christmas though is Jimmy Buffet’s, “Ho Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum” with the tag line, “Santa’s run off to the Caribbean.” Jimmy Buffet came out with a Christmas album a number of years ago and that was one of the songs on the CD. In my office I even have a little figure of Santa wearing a swimsuit and riding the waves. I love to listen to that song in the car and sing along, but I change the words slightly to the, "Pastor’s run off to the Caribbean.” The Christmas season in the church is exhausting. There are programs, special services, and parties and then you add in family events, baking and shopping, and well as wonderful as it all is, thankful it finally ends. It all happens so fast too. It is like people are trying to shove a whole years worth of celebrating into a few weeks. It is many times too hard to control, in a sense Christmas happens to you and then it’s gone. One minute you find yourself at the fourth Christmas event in as many days and then next thing you know you are watching the ball drop and it’s a new year. That is when I get visions of playing in the sand in the Caribbean. I want a margarita and the sound of steel drums in the background. Although I have never went to Caribbean, I usually do take a few days after Christmas to come down from the chaos, relax, get my bearings and think about what I want to accomplish in the coming year. I need that time every year to get it all back together. We all do.
The time after Christmas is a good opportunity to refocus. Some do that by making New Year’s resolutions. They realize everything didn’t go as well as it could have gone last year and they want to make this next year better. I make resolutions as well. One of my big resolutions this year is to eat breakfast every morning. Now that doesn’t seem ground breaking but as a diabetic who chronically skips breakfast and just drinks coffee and maybe eats a donut, it is a significant one. I know that if I can keep this resolution it will go a long way to keeping my diabetes in check and will also help me eat healthier the rest of the day. It seems like a small thing, but over time I am confident it can lead to much better health. I also believe that this is a resolution I am actually capable of keeping. I like to cook so I plan to make it interesting and maybe during the year I will share some of the fast breakfast recipes I come up with. So resolutions are a good thing. Visions are better.
What do I mean be visions? Am I talking about prophetic visions? Am I talking about hallucinations? Since we just finished Christmas am I talking about visions of sugar plums? Am I just talking about seeing? No I am talking about focus, about what we are really looking at, what we are really concentrating on. I am talking about what is our central theme of life. What causes us to do what we do every day, the reason behind our actions, the object that our decisions are based upon. Resolutions though good tend to be short term and are aimed at fixing what is wrong with us. Visions are long term; they are aimed at how we can be all that God wants us to be. A resolution says I am fat so I need to lose weight. A vision sees an ideal that could be and focuses on the object that can make that ideal a reality. So where am I going with this? How did we get from playing steel drums in the Caribbean to talking about a vision for our life? Well because maybe it’s time to stop dealing with just the symptoms and deal with the problem itself. Instead of focusing on the symptom of being worn out, or being unhealthy or whatever it is that you are dealing with, why don’t we deal with problem behind it all, our disconnect with God. I put to you that if we make God our vision many of the issues we struggle with will be handled as well. That is not to say that everything will be perfect, we are sinners living in a sinful world so nothing is ever going to be perfect, but a strong relationship with God can put everything in its proper perspective so that we don’t end up getting wrung out all the time by the chaos that we live in.
During our worship service on New Year’s Day I based the sermon on an old Irish Poem composed by Dallan Forgaill in the 8th Century. The poem is Be Thou My Vision, and it was a part of the Irish Monastic tradition before it was put to song in 1912. The first few lines of the song say, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.” I used the song because I thought it conveyed a good message for the start of the New Year. This is the type of vision that we need for 2012. We need to keep our eyes, our vision on Jesus this year. It won’t make the chaos go away but it will guide us through the chaos, it will keep us grounded and concentrating on what is really important, our relationship with God. If we put God first then all the other stuff will fall into place. When that happens then instead of being rung out by life, we can embrace life and live the way God wants us to live. So I challenge you to every day get up and let the first words of your prayer that day be, Lord be thou my vision today, and then let God take over. That doesn’t mean you can’t dream of the Caribbean, it just means you will already be focused when you get there.

Pastor Fred