Surprise, surprise. Of all the fast-moving days where I don’t have time to hear myself think, much less write, here I am on Christmas day, with just such an opportunity to think and to write. After a crack of dawn Santa extravaganza, my entire family is sacked out in various corners of the house taking late-morning and well-deserved naps. I immediately seized the moment to do a little writing, specifically to reflect on today.

For me, Christmas is a great reminder that  the center of the Christian universe is the relationship between me and God. Nothing else. It’s so easy for me to get left of center and focused in the wrong direction, namely church. As I’ve mentioned before, church is not responsible for your complete and total spiritual walk. It’s an important part, a major contributor and supporter but NOT the center.

It’s interesting to me, because while organized religion will talk about the unmatched importance of your individual walk with God, most of your time spent in church is geared toward blanket doctrines and religious societal norms where there’s not much room for individual variance and interpretation. I believe firmly that relationship with God is indeed an individual practice, unbound by any single organization or denomination. The individual connection between myself and God trumps what is communicated to me generally and broadly in mass consumption.

That’s not terribly popular for me to say, because most of us have declared the church as the center of the universe and our relationships with God revolve around it.

We humans have always had trouble determining rotation. Copernicus was the first to clear up the misconception that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around our planet. As you might recall from your junior high history books, another well-known astronomer, Galileo, was publicly ridiculed and punished for defending the theory that the sun was actually at the center.

Much in the same way, we’ve again settled in on something earthly, the church, being the center when in reality it is the son. 

Today is Christmas, and there isn’t a better day to refocus and get back to orbiting the right center. To remember that organized religion plays an important role in fortifying us, but that the truly individual relationship we have with God is what should be our core. And sometimes, that might mean we carry beliefs that don’t align with the church or that we may act in ways that other Christians might not readily understand. I say that’s okay. Our journeys are not cookie-cutter  generic. They are highly individualized.

Why then would we expect God not to interact with us in an equally personal manner, instead of providing us all with a generic call and a generic path to grow closer to Him? Yes, there are common truths, characteristics, etc. that are foundational to our beliefs as Christians. But within that framework, I believe God has a highly specific, one-of-a-kind plan for each and every one of us. We’ll miss out on that if we rotate around doctrine and norms and organization instead of a relationship with Him.

With that, let say Merry Christmas to you and yours. And may we all refocus and revive our Godly pursuits.