December. What a strange month. Where I come from, it is blistering hot and suffocatingly humid in December. If you don't slip on a shirt, slop on some SPF30+ sunscreen, slap on a hat, seek some shade, and slide on some sunnies (sunglasses), then you can pretty much say hello to skin cancer. Australia will do that to you. The sun is just one of a thousand things out to kill you Down Under. With that said, there is probably nothing I love more! The heat and the palm trees - they will forever have my heart. Here in the South of the States, December is much colder, but of course in both Australia and America, people go bananas for Christmas the moment the calendar flips over to December. Some things never change.
I found myself in a similar mindset - rushing through the first two weeks of the month just so I could reach the winter holidays sooner. Down with the assignments and goodbye to quality work, because speed was my best friend as I sought out the most efficient way to arrive at the first day of break. Nothing else seems to matter in December, nothing except for Christmas. And then that lazy week between the birth of Christ and the New Year. I felt like if I just sped through the first two weeks, I could relax and let my brain rest. I would no longer have to reason, judge, or think. I would no longer need to use my head at all.
Alas, how wrong I was. We hard for 11 months of the year, and somehow productivity becomes the enemy in that last, twelfth month. Don't be mistaken, I am not proclaiming that we work every single day of December. I am simply regretting my tendency to completely shut down all intelligent functions when I arrive at that long-awaited winter break. Who says that I need to mindlessly watch TV and fill my head with junk when I can sit by the fire and read a book? Who says that I need to point my head down and immerse myself in a smartphone screen when I can look up and the person in front of me and engage in a simple conversation? I can ask this question many times. The devil delights in my inattentiveness, he loves my passivity. I sit here tonight writing this, because I want to encourage whoever is reading to abandon that urge to drop everything important and become nothing but an eating and sleeping robot. I know all too well the dangers of putting my mind to sleep and acting on nothing but impulse and desire.
Perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem if all we desired was the Lord.
mattyC