One of the key mental features that makes human beings thinking creatures is our ability to make connections – particularly, connections between events or ideas that are seemingly coincidental at first glance. Thoughts that appear random and disassociated can string together in ways that reveal to us new ways of looking at ourselves, others, and the world around us.

I was reflecting the other day on a couple of the primary focuses we have at Mindekirken in the few days remaining of this year of 2001 – specifically, Stewardship and Christmas. At first glance, the connection is strictly due to their juxtaposition in successive months; indeed, that was how my thoughts came to them. But, in one of those moments of connection, I had the feeling of pieces fitting together in ways that they hadn’t before. I realized that there’s a commonality here that I had not noticed up to now: They both center around giving and receiving, and on multiple levels.

If you ask any small child what Christmas is about, he or she will probably tell you, "I get lots of presents!" Hopefully if you ask them right after Sunday school, you’ll get a somewhat different answer than that! As we study Christmas as children, we learn that there is indeed a gift involved, but it’s a lot bigger than toys and games – it’s God’s own Son, come as a child to offer all of us a way to salvation. As we become adults, and often parents in our own right, we see the other side of the children’s Christmas presents, and become the ones who do the giving more than the getting. We learn to get joy out of what we give, sometimes even more than out of what we receive. We learn as we get older and more mature to appreciate the joy that exists in giving.

Once I had put the upcoming Holiday Season into that sort of perspective, the parallels with Stewardship became pretty obvious to me. All we have to do is keep in mind how much we’ve received from God, and the answer is literally everything, starting with our own selves and our own lives. Looking at things from this perspective, giving some of it back to God, in the forms of both our Church and of gifts to those in material need, becomes a very logical action. To further reinforce this, God tells us in the Bible that not only is it our duty, or obligation. It’s also a path to personal and spiritual growth; thus, an opportunity. Think about how much money we pay out to various earthly entities – governments, utilities, and more – simply because we have to. Here God gives us the possibility to both give and receive – and the spiritual growth and rewards we receive are of so much higher a level than what we give!

As we approach the end of the year and the blessed holidays that come at this time, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on some of the various levels and meanings of giving and receiving. This wonderful world in which we live can be so distracting – if we’re not careful, we forget that as Christians we have priorities that transcend the normal day-to-day whirl of events. Perhaps one thing we could all pray for is that each of us could better keep in perspective what’s really important for us, individually and together, in the long run.