No Room At the Inn?

How can we simplify things?

How do we avoid becoming saturated? I don’t know about you, but the run up to Christmas always seems so busy. There’s extra events to go to, extra food to buy, extra people to see, extra presents to give and receive, extra programmes on the TV – extra, extra, extra!

Now it’s not that these things are necessarily bad or wrong, it’s just that we can too easily become saturated that we can miss out on what’s really important.

Christmas can end us as a time of mindless overload as we stuff our diaries with events, our shopping trollies with luxuries, our stomachs with vast amounts of food and our relationships with strain.

"Christmas can end us as a time of mindless overload"

You can have too much of a good thing, as the residents of Cumbria have experienced with the recent flooding. Our land needs regular rainfall to support habitat, agriculture and amenity – but when you have a month’s worth of rain in a day the ground becomes saturated and damaging flooding results. If we’re not careful, we can flood our life with too much over the Christmas period and wash away some of the important things in our lives in the process.

"At the heart of the Christmas story is an overcrowded inn"

Don't let the important things get washed away...

At the heart of the Christmas story is an overcrowded inn with no room to receive the son of God. Listening to a talk Leon Evans recently he reminded us that we can be like that inn – too full to receive what’s really important.

It’s an on-going challenge in my own life not to over-commit, not to become too saturated with good things, so that I can leave space for the important things. I love being busy, love doing all kinds of things, but the knack I’m slowly mastering is getting a sustainable balance with my time.

It’s usually in the new year that people start making resolutions, after the excess of Christmas. It's after the floods that people start to rebuild. But how about avoiding the saturation in the first place?

How can you simplify your Christmas season this year? How can you make space? What about having one less appointment in your diary a week? Or having one less drink and mince pie at your Christmas Party? How about setting a spending limit on your present buying, or agreeing not to exchange gifts but give to a worthy charity instead?

Let's have space this Christmas.

There’s lots of things we can do to make a little more space in our hearts for the things that really
matter in our lives, without being a Scrooge or a skinflint! Let's not be an overcrowded inn this Christmas.

"We can be like that inn – too full to receive what’s really important."

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I was recently interviewed for The Zone Show and the Changeability Podcast, both of which are well worth a listen!