‘The most wonderful time of the year’?

Similar to when I was a kid and didn’t have school around Christmastime, I took things a little easier over the holidays. Our oldest daughter came home for a week. The family sang around the piano. At church, the services spoke of the great hope and promise available to us thanks to God’s Christ. I could certainly see why a popular Christmas song declares, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”

And yet, I also see the need to challenge this sentiment in a way.

Over the years, my family’s experiences with colds and flus have strongly coincided with the letdown in the time after Christmas. It can feel as if the post-holiday blues have an effect on our health and well-being. My family has always turned to prayer in these instances and consistently found a rallying spirit that has brought physical healing, joy, and even lessons to be learned.

These healings aren’t the result of waiting for the warmer spring to arrive. They happen when the new spring of spiritually insightful thought helps us understand something differently – including realizing that the most wonderful time of the year is always possible when we fully embrace the good that God ceaselessly has for us. Since God is constant and ever present, so is His goodness.

The Bible speaks of God as Love and Spirit. It’s been helpful to me, and to many others I know, to understand everyone’s true nature as an expression of this Love and Spirit. In finding deeper awareness of the nature of God and of ourselves, there comes a realization that the really meaningful and strengthening stuff of life is always available to be brought forth in everyone, at any time. We indeed can – and are needed to – find joy in expressing God’s qualities of intelligence, creativity, grace, and so on, to light up our world for everyone’s benefit, not just at Christmastime but always.

One reason December can feel like such a wonderful time of the year is that the many festivities can help to distract us from the world’s ongoing challenges. Then post-December comes, and we’re reminded of these challenges again. But we can face the demands for a new year of progress with the determination to help the world feel more of God’s presence and unstoppable good purpose for all.

I have found no better help in this effort than turning my thinking to the Christ, the spiritual idea of God that Jesus represented, to realize the fullness of our spirituality. I cling to this assurance from the book of Hebrews: “We continue to share in all that Christ has for us so long as we steadily maintain until the end the trust with which we began” (3:14, J. B. Phillips, “The New Testament in Modern English”).

So here I am now, during another post-holiday season, cherishing the timeless ability to express God’s qualities. It seems particularly imperative to do this now, not only for myself but for the world. What if we began to identify the most wonderful time of the year not as the time with the most festivities but as every moment we have available to us to experience and share what the Christ has for us? (That’s every moment.)

This new way of identifying wonderfulness can be a big step for folks. It certainly has been for me. Big or small, the best moments come when we’re filled with something spiritual, helpful, purposeful.

This is what Mary Baker Eddy saw in the Science of the Christ that she endeavored to share with the world. She wrote, “To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science” (“The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” p. 160).

Indeed, the most wonderful time of the year is every moment throughout the year in which we let our spiritual purpose of magnifying God come forward and express God’s great qualities of good.