If you are like me, you completely missed Christmas this year. You didn't sleep through it or anything. No, you saw it barreling down the tracks, blaring its repetitious songs on the synthesizer, blinding you with Christmas lights like they were flares in the night. The train sped by in a whirl of festive smells and colors, with balls of crumpled wrapping paper wafting out like confetti. Children literally laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile. And as it tore past me, I saw the manger scene strapped to the end
of the caboose; Mary clutching the hoof of a sheep that had fallen
overboard.
And that was my Christmas.
Oh, I ran after that train alright. Yes, with double-sided tape stuck in my hair, clutching a bowl of cookie dough and waving my Santa spatula while breathlessly choking out Silent Night, I chased down that train. But to no avail. I missed it.
Oh, I tried to find it in the perfect gifts (that I was still finishing on Christmas Eve), in homemade treats (because store-bought ones are terribly impersonal), and in a cozy home (did I mention that I re-did the Christmas lights four times and it still looks like the worst Christmas pageant ever was staged there?). Even the Christmas Eve service, which was designed to slow the momentum, wasn't long enough for me to catch my breath or catch that train.
However, to my surprise, as soon as the train passed me, it ground to a halt. So much momentum for such a short season. By December 26, the train is now motionless on the tracks, and you're left to clean up the mess it left. Decorations are being taken down, the music has stopped, and the Christmas treats are growing stale. As I climb aboard this now-lifeless train in the aftermath of the party aboard that I missed, I begin to realize that this was not the train I was looking for at all. Without the life of anticipation pulsing through the tinsel and carols, these things are bland, cliche, and empty.
But if this is not the train I was looking for, which one was it? Where did I miss it?
And I realize that it was no train at all for which I was looking. But rather, a seat... in the presence of the King. The King who has made his Creation pregnant with anticipation. A King who has invited us to the table... to a feast that he has prepared. That he ultimately made available to us in a stable under a bright star, and through a hand pierced by a sharp stake, and by a glorious Christ reappearing from the barren grave. And, like Plato with his Theory of Forms, or the Ghost of Christmas Past, with the shadow of things that were, the Christmas Train is only a poor form of a truer glory that is swelling with each passing day. Gifts and perfect family moments are only shadows on the wall of the glory that is to come when we will be face-to-face with our good King, and our worship will overflow beyond that of any Christmas so far.
So next year, at the first sound of the Christmas Train coming down the tracks, I will not be more prepared, lacing up my shoes, baking another two dozen cookies to provide gifts for the neighbors I forgot this year. No, I will probably do less. Instead, I will pursue the greater form. The perfect form. I will put the expectations of the season in their rightful place, seeing them as shadows of the truer glory that is to come, which can only be expressed in fragmented form on this earth until the perfect comes. And armed with this perspective, I will not be chasing trains. I will be worshiping at the feet of my King.
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